Winter '05

Winter is the harshest season, even in the South, and I’m staring down the barrel of it now. It’s mid-August and the fishing is dead from the heat, and we’ll have a short season before the first cold front pushes down and sends the fish deep into residential canals or into offshore waters, if not into warmer climes further south to the equator. We’ll be left here, looking to the West, waiting for spring.
I’ll be shuffling through the house, completing the list of chores put off through the spring and fall, or finishing yard work that the summer’s heat made potentially deadly. I’ll wander in and out of the garage, trying to come up with some reasonable facsimile of angling, whether tying flies, the angler’s substitute for fishing, or the really desperate acts of organizing fly boxes by species, or should it be water type, or maybe season; either way it is a long time to go. I can find meaningful work to do that fishing turned into “not enough time for that”, tying leaders, rod and reel maintenance or wader patching. Either way, I hope that this winter will not be as dark as last.
I had come home from my typical January Saturday, playing the role of the guy who hangs out with the owners of the local fly shop, the guy you see in there, whom you’re not quite sure if he works there or not because he seems to know where everything is and is there every time you are, but he never actually helps a customer. That night I received an email that shattered the last ten years of my life with a fury.
It was from an old girlfriend, but not just an old girlfriend, the girlfriend; the one you met freshman year, the Lit major who read Yeats aloud in the dark of a dorm room, while you lay under the blankets watching snow fall against the window, praying that the distance from Hartford to Boston wasn’t too far when summer came. We had a passionate affair that year, kids playing at being adults, and I came close to proposing to her over that long summer, when the trip down to the mailbox and a hand addressed envelope from Boston meant a good day. I remember her smiling when I showed her the first fly rod I bought and how she wasn’t bored when we’d take a trip over to the Farmington River when she visited Connecticut.
The affair continued through the next fall, but then I ended it for no good reason at all, namely there wasn’t one. She cried that night, sitting on a stonewall near her dorm, and I regretted seeing those tears for years after. We saw each other sporadically until graduation-passing each other on campus, at bars, she was always pleasant. The last time I saw her was at graduation, I was a newly minted lieutenant, and she was a Lit Major with no certain future; she smiled and wished me luck.
All that came back in an instant 10 years later. She was now married with a couple of kids, still living in Boston. My reply was a stream of consciousness mess, a purge of ten years of war, divorce, exile to Florida in the face of a violent ex-wife, and a life that had somehow come out alright in the end. I tried to go to sleep that night, but the memories of a past gone by gave me no reprieve. Her last sentence rolled around my thoughts, haunting me like a shadow in the dark “Even when you tried not to be, you were always good to me”. Around two I left the bed and walked to the front of my house and looked out the window, while my dogs slept oblivious. I pulled back the curtain, and looked at the streetlight, it was snowing in Florida. My wife came up behind me and asked why I was up and what was bothering me. I pointed out the snow falling softly and melting as it touched the ground and softly answered “the fishing is going to hell for a while”.