Going Fishin'

October 25, 2023

It’s hard to let go of things. It’s healthy to let go of things.

The last time Shirli and I camped together was on the occasion of my sixty-eighth birthday at Open Pond in the Conecuh National Forest.

Shirli wanted her own tackle box. I bought the green one for her not long after we moved to Alabama from New Jersey and outfitted it with a few things for her. That green box became our shared grab it and go tackle box when we’d go camping or fishing. On our last trip camping, Shirli noticed that the handle was broken and ordered the red one for me as a birthday present when we got home. Both of them have been sitting here all this time waiting for me to make the contents transfer.

I couldn’t do it. Then I went through a season where I didn’t want to do it. That side of me still didn’t want to do it because, like never before, I knew it would evoke memories and emotions. It did that but it is now done. 

When Shirli and I began downsizing at the blue house in Fairhope, when it came to certain stuff, she would say, “Take a picture of it and move it along.” Her voice and words echoed in my mind. Picture taken. I thought about putting the green box in the back room and dealing with it another day. Cradling it with one arm like a baby, I walked it out to the big can and deposited it.

There are some hard things associated with this life-transition.

I’ve been thinking about it for a while now. I’m doing it. I’m taking up fishing again as a pastime. I’m also thinking about taking up fly-tying again. I really enjoyed tying flies and still have all my kit. I need to check my fly-head cement. It may be set up by now. I need to attempt tying a fly to see what challenges my dexterity and vision present at this stage of things. Streamers and larger stuff should be no problem. Those tiny hooks might be a little testy. Oh. I still have my waders too. Nice ones at that.

So, I’m going fishin’ with a brand-new tackle box replete with its own set of precious memories.

What I’m seeing of me these days reminds me of myself before I took that bad moral turn in my teens. What I enjoyed then is still what I enjoy now. It is in and through them that I am best able to return, as much as possible, to the innocence that I knew in my childhood and early teens rambling the woods, fence-rows, and field-rows of that little hardscrabble farm where I was reared.

Not only so. The woods became my “safe-place” when I was little more than a child. I learned that there are very few things in the woods that can hurt me as a person physically. I also learned that there is absolutely nothing in the woods that can hurt me as a person emotionally.

The woods are still my safe-place.