March –
I grumble at the end of February, bringing unrelenting cold and discomfort; but although the weather lies the calendar does not lie; it will be March on Sunday.
My wife – curmudgeon – reminds me that we can get terrible snowstorms in the Midwest in March. I wave her off.
And my iphone has nothing but bad news for the AuSable and the Manistee and the PM and the Black for early March: low temps like "9" and "3" and "7" -
I wave it off -
Because March is undeniably more than the end of the beginning of winter (with apologies to Winston Churchill) - it is the beginning of the end of winter.
December and January and February in the rear view mirror – the glories of April and May and June dead ahead.
We will make stories this year.
Good stories, bad stories.
Fish will be caught.
Fish will get away.
The guide will say "you should have been here last weekend"
and he'll say "there he is! 10 o'clock... NOW!" and you'll take a picture with your camera or just your memory and years later you won't remember if that Brown hit in 2015 or 2010 but you'll remember her and if you could paint you could paint the whole damn scene, as perfect as a Rembrandt.
We are 9 months away from what the poet Laurie Lee wrote was "a cold so cold that the blood snaps like a wire, and the heart's sap stills, and the year seems defeated."
This year is not defeated; it is new, and alive with promise;
with flies and friends and cigars and fish and a random eagle on the Flint River and who-knows-what-else,
and we will just have to wait and see and be there.
And we will live this year and some might die this year because that is the Nature of things but it is March and it is new and it is wonderful.
I grumble at the end of February, bringing unrelenting cold and discomfort; but although the weather lies the calendar does not lie; it will be March on Sunday.
My wife – curmudgeon – reminds me that we can get terrible snowstorms in the Midwest in March. I wave her off.
And my iphone has nothing but bad news for the AuSable and the Manistee and the PM and the Black for early March: low temps like "9" and "3" and "7" -
I wave it off -
Because March is undeniably more than the end of the beginning of winter (with apologies to Winston Churchill) - it is the beginning of the end of winter.
December and January and February in the rear view mirror – the glories of April and May and June dead ahead.
We will make stories this year.
Good stories, bad stories.
Fish will be caught.
Fish will get away.
The guide will say "you should have been here last weekend"
and he'll say "there he is! 10 o'clock... NOW!" and you'll take a picture with your camera or just your memory and years later you won't remember if that Brown hit in 2015 or 2010 but you'll remember her and if you could paint you could paint the whole damn scene, as perfect as a Rembrandt.
We are 9 months away from what the poet Laurie Lee wrote was "a cold so cold that the blood snaps like a wire, and the heart's sap stills, and the year seems defeated."
This year is not defeated; it is new, and alive with promise;
with flies and friends and cigars and fish and a random eagle on the Flint River and who-knows-what-else,
and we will just have to wait and see and be there.
And we will live this year and some might die this year because that is the Nature of things but it is March and it is new and it is wonderful.
