Gone fishing!

 

Is your summer busy? What with yard work and travels and squeezing in a few warm weather musts like farmers markets or barbeques or outdoor concerts, the summer disappears too fast. I mean, what happened to June? The next thing I know it's July and I haven't found time for a bike ride or an ice cream cone or paddling around the lake behind my house.
     So when my guy Steve insisted I drive all the way to his place in northern Michigan to finally use that fishing license we bought a month ago, I felt a little exasperated. I don't have time, I told him. I'm giving a presentation Tuesday to the Word Weavers group in Allendale. I need to go through my notes, practice my power point, collect hand outs.
      And there's that book I'm supposed to be writing. Full Moon Friday is the third book in my Jordan Daily News Mystery series. It's scheduled to come out June 13, 2014 -- the last Full Moon Friday the 13th until 2049. A year isn't a lot of time to write a book and get it edited and published, so I need to stay on track. I'm getting into some really fun parts of the story and I enjoy my writing time.
      And one of these days I've got to sort out all that medicare paperwork they've been sending me. I turn 65 in October so I need to figure out my alphabet of options: Part A, B, C and D. And clean the garage. And call a plumber about that pipe in the basement. And...
       But sometimes, when you love a guy, you got to make time for him and his passion -- fishing. So Saturday, for the first time this summer, I went fishing. It wasn't exactly slamma jamma, which is the way Steve likes to catch fish. We ended up with 32 keepers, more than enough for a nice mess of fish and plenty of left overs. But it took us all day.
           We caught a lot of little perch that are more of an irritation because you got to keep taking the hooks out of their mouths, trying not to hurt the squirmy little things, throw them back, replace your bait and do it all over again, without really adding to "the catch."
      And then there's the big irritations -- usually a rock bass or some other fighting fish that Steve says is fun to catch (we differ on the definition of fun) but also gets thrown back. Saturday Steve caught a whopper. A huge needle nose gar that looks like a prehistoric monster -- and it is. This is the kind of  fish Fred Flinstone probably brought home to Wilma. But Steve's gar just messed up our lines, tied them in knots and forced him to get out the pliers and scissors and redo some rigging. (after the ugly fish was returned to the water, of course.)
      But sitting back in the boat for six hours -- enjoying the sun and the Lake Leelanau scenery, exchanging lazy meaningless small talk with Steve and his grandson Mitchell, and getting lost in slow summer  moments to just think about clouds and ripples and whatever -- I remembered why I like fishing and why I need to make more time for it in my life.
       Slow down, just sit. Or as the minister said this morning at Church in the Park: Let go and Let God. Echoed in a song from "The Full Monty"--"Let it go, let it go, let it go."