A Short Story of a Red Canoe

The canoe was originally my Grandpapa’s. It is a big red fiberglass canoe, big enough to comfortably fit a family of four. The thing weighs a ton; this was no high tech portable, portaging canoe. It was a canoe you stuck a small outboard motor on and took your family on day adventure on. I don’t know when my father inherited the canoe but I have some happy memories of day trips with my parents and brother in the red canoe. My parents live across the street from ocean and every few feet there is a water access point. It is common for people to store their small boats and canoes at these water access points. We kept the canoe for years at one of those water access points, a few houses down and across the street from my parent’s home. Then one day ten years ago graduation weekend, the canoe went missing. We all assumed that some drunken teenagers took the canoe for a joy paddle. I mean who else would else think of moving a canoe that weighed a ton. I assumed the canoe ended up at the bottom of the ocean or broke apart and wash up on the shores up and down the inlet. But throughout the years my dad swore up and down he saw people paddling our canoe up and down the inlet. I never believed him, “It’s not our canoe its one that just looks like our old canoe” I would say. Ten years passed with the occasional sighting of the “red canoe”. This summer I was at my parent’s house for dinner, and out of the blue my dad says “The canoe is back”. “Bullshit” I reply. “There is no way that our canoe is back after ten years” I say. “I’ll show you after dinner” he says. We walk down to the water that one over from the original access point where we stored our canoe. And there under a tarp was our canoe, the same heavy red fiber glass canoe. “Are you going to bring it back to the house and reclaim it I ask”? “Naww” says my dad “Let’s leave it here, think of all the interesting adventures the canoe has had in the past ten years, we didn’t use it enough anyways. At least someone got some use out of it”. Now every few months I go back down to the water access point to see if the canoe is still there. Sometime it is, sometimes it not and I wonder what is the canoe up to these days.