Sailing with my dad

It's a warm, bright November day, and if it weren't for the lack of leaves on the trees, and the ones strewn over the lawn, you'd swear it was a warm summers' day outside judging only with your eyes.

Yesterday was my dad's birthday, and I'm fond of joking I'm the only boy in our family. As a kid I was a bit of a tomboy, and have tons of memories of dad and I going down to the lake to explore or skip rocks and explore, riding our bikes (including a few pretty good wipe-outs) and a special Saturday morning treat.

I'd go sailing with my dad.

To be clear, not the boat kind of sailing, but yard sale-ing. We weren't a yacht-owning kind of family. We weren't even a yacht-borrowing kind of family. Heck, I'm not even sure we could sail a dinghy.

We'd get ready for our sailing adventures the night before looking through the classifieds to find sales that sounded good - neighbourhood ones would be a huge volume in a small space, and usually the shorter ads would reveal better finds than big, flowery descriptive ones. Which isn't to say that the descriptive ones were skipped over - we'd check those for items we particularly needed.

Sailing was a big part of growing up in a family that was rich in other ways, but definitely not rich monetarily.

Dad and I would circle the ads we thought would be good, and set off early the next morning on our bikes with pockets laden with change to see what we could find.

Often a collectible die-cast toy would catch our eye - a friend of the family collected them and showed us what to look for when finding something valuable, other times we'd find plates that would match the so-called "unbreakable" corelle dishes to complete our set.

I mostly don't remember what we bought, but the time we spent together and the people we came across.

One lady we nicknamed a rather large and boisterous woman "BO" because of her pungent aroma. She smelled like the word "bathe" hadn't crossed her mind, and, being from a small town I think she was out pretty much every weekend and our paths crossed quite often.

It often became a social visit as well, as we'd stop by friends' houses when we were close by.

On days like today I think of the fun we had and smile. I was a lucky kid.