Fishing for a feeling

This is the day for it.  We decided this day needed some quiet family time more than anything else, so Janelle assembled a picnic while I finished up some garden tasks and retrieved fishing rods and tackle from the attic. Just two lines:  one for each child since us unlicensed adults can’t legally fish our own lines…we can only assist a child who wishes to fish. Alida is two, so she needs LOTS of help, which works for me.  We figured while we were there we could poke around after some nice rounded sandstone rocks that can be found in the neighbors’ woods near the pond and which would be perfect clambering rocks for Nora’s memory garden.

The trek to the neighbors’ farm pond was an exquisite piece of rural walking.  The air around us was in constant, light motion and was just on the dry side of perfect.  Because of the late spring all the trees are still wearing their freshest green leaves here at the beginning of June.

Halfway there it hit me like an acorn to the skull:  I had forgotten the worms!  Pshaw.  We paused to consider, and decided it wasn’t worth going back for them, nor getting bent out of shape.  We’d use lures, or improvise some bait from the woods…surely there would be something a fish could like under a rock or log.

Arriving at the recently shorn hayfield, we found a shady spot and made leisurely work of consuming the zesty lettuce-and-pesto (garlic scape pesto and parsley pesto…does it get zestier?!) sandwiches, tortilla chips, home-canned dill pickles and mint tea Janelle had packed.  She pointed out the sky to me:  the moderately billowing clouds in the clear air framing the lowering sun was almost too soulful to bear.

When we had had enough to eat, we turned our attention to the fishing project.  We turned the pint jar from the pickles into a bait hopper and began thinking about what invertebrates might be hiding under what objects.  A quick look around revealed some large, moveable objects close at hand:  Hay bales!

We rocked a few round bales back off of their flat spots and poked mildly through the slightly damp and wholly miserable smashed grass beneath.  On the third try we located a fat scarab grub, a young earwig, and a miniscule slug.  Hey, we’ll take what we can get, so I nabbed them and dropped them in the jar, which was not easy in the case of the slug.  We made our way to the pond.  “Finally,” Kali said.

She had decided that bass were her prey of choice for the evening, so with excited earnestness she selected a brownish see-through rubber worm from my tackle box that she thought the likeliest to attract their attention. I threaded it onto the hook, she turned and strode away, the lure swinging crazily back and forth in time to her gangly nine-year-old paces.  She was so beautiful.

After she was off and casting into the shallows she favors (the only bass she has caught sucked the worm in nearly at her toes), I speared the hapless grub for Alida and then slung it out to the middle to dangle tantalizingly a foot below the surface.  The bobber looked so alone out there waiting for the moment when the grub would catch some fish’s cool round eye and its little red-and-white self would be dunked a few times, then jerked under.  A few minutes of our quiet attention went to the theoretically impending drama.  But as the drama began to fail to materialize, the loveliness of the evening began to predominate in my consciousness.  There was that sky again.  My spirit canyon was echoing with I am so lucky.

A few more minutes passed that way before Janelle said she could help the baby to fish; maybe I wanted to poke around in the woods for rocks and perhaps some more effective bait?  That seemed like a good idea, so I handed over both and forged a route through the chest-high grass to the edge of the woods.  The woods is included in the pasture, so there was little undergrowth to obstruct my movement or vision.  I located a plentiful pile of rocks right away and walked over to it.  As I stepped up onto the heap a rock suddenly gave way and turned under my foot; to keep balance my foot instinctively stuck out and found another rock…which was no better than the first.  Luckily for my bipedal pride I managed to find steady footing without ever toppling, but the process was repeated a few times as I picked my way over the mound of time-blunted sandstone that made the lichens look young.

And there it was:  Like a bobber jerked under when you’re looking away, the feeling I was stalking bit for real and without warning.  The instinctual and potentially embarrassing struggle to regain balance that began in a particular way the day Nora died, five years ago today.  My inner self gave a little smile of recognition, issued some slack, and then gave a tug: the hook was set.  To continue the metaphor, I thought if I kept a little tension (but not too much) on the line I might have something to write.

I spent the rest of the evening playing it in while I:  located some (far more satisfactory) worms under chunks of fallen limb or two-foot flakes of their shed bark, installed said worms on empty hooks, held the baby on one hip and the fishing line against the other, demonstrated to Kali how to handle a bluegill (no luck with the bass) without getting prickled, detangled her spin-caster in the slanting light of evening, walked home at dusk with three lovely females (one of whom was proudly carrying a stringer with three lovely bluegills), and watched with my heart full to bursting as Kali rasped her fish with gusto—scales flying in all directions.  And now I am here at the computer at half-past midnight and it looks like I have landed the thing.  Finally!