Can You - Canoe - What About At Night With No Lights

So ..... there I was sitting at the table early in the morning, finishing my devotional BLOG, when Nate appeared to let me know that school was cancelled because of the storm that was coming.  He got a text from his soccer coach.  Isn't that the way we are supposed to be notified of such things?  I guess it is, today.  After working past his joy, he told me about an incident with his soccer ball and his friend Sam the night before.

Several times a week, Nate will go down by the lake to practice dribbling with his soccer ball.  And now, with his buddy and teammate, Sam.  So as Nate tells it.  They were passing the ball to each other when an errant (my word not Nate's) kick sent the ball toward the lake.  They both chased it and almost ... almost got it when it went into the lake.  Oh, did I say is was dark outside? (What to do...what to do?)  They went back to Sam's house to tell his parents that the ball was in the lake and they were going to use a canoe to get it. (15-20 minutes pass).  They returned to the lake, got in the canoe, paddled out to get the ball and realized they couldn't see anything ... it's was dark!  So they went back to shore, got Sam's truck, pointed it at the lake and turned the bright lights on. The ball was nowhere in sight.  So they got in the canoe, paddled out, to find the ball, and couldn't so they went back to the truck.  Of course ... the place where they got the canoe was not near the truck, so they put the canoe in the truck and took it back.  Very responsible.

I was thinking as Nate was sharing his adventure that I would have never told my parents I had done something like that for fear of being condemned to living in the boundaries of my yard, forever.  Sometimes, some stories are best not shared.  But I smiled as I remembered scaling cliff faces and tramping through the woods, learning how to shoot a shotgun, being chased by a bull across a pasture and spending the better part of the morning with my buddy sitting on a shed roof waiting for the bull to lose interest in us.  All of this unknown to my parents .. fortunately for me.   Oh, there are many more stories .. but the bottom line is .. I survived to tell them another day.  And as I thought about Nate and Sam, I thought .. you know, that is something that Donald and I would have done. Now for the rest of the story.  Nate did find the soccer ball that night.  He found it the next day, it was in a yard near the lake.  How it got there remains a mystery, but Nate has great story tucked away in his memory.

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