It’s been seven months and a handful of days since I cast a line in quest of trout. I’m itching in a bad way to get back in the river. Matters were complicated last week when Husband went fly fishing without me. I’ll forgive him eventually, but perhaps not until I’m waist high in waders with a net full of browns.
Ever the optimist, I’m focusing on a simple math equation that proves at this point in the season I have more trout-less days behind me than ahead. And despite the envy, Husband’s recent jaunt to the river signals a shift in seasons.
Fly rods, tackle boxes, and pretty much every item pictured in the Orvis catalog have been tugged free from a long, tight hibernation. Hints there’s an anxious angler afoot linger, some more obvious than others, in the garage, laundry room, and even occasionally on the kitchen table. Although I have to draw the line somewhere and I really have a short fuse for gutting knives and rusty pliers absentmindedly left where supper, be it fish or not, resides.
Generally speaking though I’m happy to find Husband’s fishing trails, left like crumbs, throughout the house. Stumbled upon long after he’s reached the river, clues like the discarded packaging found on the baby grand in the living room tell me he’s rigged up a new 5x lead. And, tiny hooks with just enough trace of iridescent shimmer to catch my eye on our ebony stained hardwood floors tell me he’s cleaned out his chest pack and the discarded, mangled flies that hide next to dust bunnies by the baseboards once met the mouth of a hungry brown trout. Deemed unusable, probably snapped by his pliers or half eaten by his catch, Husband stashed the mangled flies in his pouch only to make the journey from Colorado via the garage to my living room floors. A hell of a journey, if you think about it, just to be jettisoned in my suburban recycling bin.
All this to say, fishing season is upon us. While our husband to wife fishing ratio is 3:1, my day’s coming. Summer will be here before we know it, and if I’m lucky I’ll squeeze in a trip or two before we head to Colorado.
In the meantime, I’m satisfying my angling needs with words—both reading and writing. I have a stack of good reads on fly fishing scattered throughout the house and loaded on my Kindle. If you have a hankering for fly fishing or perhaps just want to appreciate the experience from the comfort of your favorite arm chair, pick up one of these stories and read along with me.
What book(s) are you reading right now? I’d love to know. Feel free to share in the comments or join the conversation on Facebook {and if you haven’t will you ‘like’ my page, pretty please?}
Oh and if you know of a good fly fishing story penned by a woman, please give it a shout out. Novels? Memoirs? Poetry? I haven’t found much written by women on fly fishing, which is interesting since the oldest piece of literature on fly fishing, The Treatise of Fishing with an Angle, is attributed to a woman. Hmmm. . .
Love,
I come from fly-fishing people. And although I’ve never tried it, I love to read about it. Thanks for the recs! Also want you to know that my mother was always better than my father, and he was proud to tell anyone.