The Sinker

This is a sinker which has been on the end of my dock for centuries decades. What's so amazing about that statement is that this very same dock has been flooded over by various storms--including a hurricane and a tropical storm--that have knocked heavy-duty items clean overboard and into the creek. Yet this one little sinker stays put.

For Grandma J. any of you who are unacquainted with sinkers, they're the weight that you tie to the end of a fishing line to keep it below the surface of the water or on the bottom of the creek or river you're fishing in. I've also used them as paper weights to weigh down crab lines but that's probably not the intended use for them.

My father has thousands of these stashed in various places like the garage, the boat house, the barn, etc., but a few have managed to linger on the dock in spite of Mother Nature's every effort to nudge them overboard.

This particular one looked like a fish to me. (A fish with a string attached to it, that is.) The way the colors of the string and the weight blended in with the dock also gave me pause.

Gave me pause? Did I really say that something "gave me pause?" How does that work, anyway, this giving of pause? Maybe they thought that saying "caused me to pause" would sound too Dr. Seuss-like. Still. Even so. Better to sound like Dr. Seuss than a geek or a freak, that's what I always say.

Now that I've analyzed this simple sinker to death, the only thing remaining is to share a poem that I wrote, because that's what weird normal people do, isn't it, they write poems about things like fishing line sinkers when they are crazier than a loon trying to stay awake in a meeting at work.

The Sinker
By Chesapeake Bay Woman, written in under four minutes while pretending to take notes attending a meeting yesterday that lasted 2.5 hours but should have lasted four minutes.

At the end of a dock
Off the Chesapeake Bay
Lay a fishing line sinker
That wouldn't go away.
Right there on the boards
It would stay. It would stay

through hurricanes and flooding
and Nor'easters too.
The dock would be swallowed
By the tide as it grew.
But the little lone sinker
Stayed put through and through.

You'd think that at some point
This lone little sinker
Would wash off the dock
'twas a clingy little stinker.
Then again, you have to wonder why Chesapeake Bay Woman didn't just bend over, pick the dang thing up and put it away or throw it overboard.

The End.

* Have you ever used sinkers for anything other than their intended use?

* Is there something in your house, your yard, or anywhere in your daily travels that you know you should pick up, put away or throw away, yet you don't?

* Fill in the blank: The last thing to give me pause was ______________.