Ninety Days

That title was once a very common utterance. In my youth, thousands of products from household gadgets to automobiles were hawked with a “ninety-day guarantee”, and those that didn’t sell so fast might be offered on time: “ninety-days same as cash”. The point is that, back then, ninety-days was considered a substantial amount of time.

These days, I guess that period represents the last significant milepost along the long journey through winter; spring may not be imminent, but it isn’t a lifetime away either.

The snow is falling heavily here in Crooked Eddy, and I am hoping that it continues. No, I don’t wish to be buried in it, but the alternative is said to be a couple of inches of rain on top of the snow fallen during the passage of these two winter storms. I don’t care to see my rivers battered with flood waters. There are trout eggs down in that gravel, and millions of immature insects, two classes of life that I would like to find more of when spring does beckon me back to the water’s edge.

Just over the mountain here, three beautifully flamed pieces of bamboo are being perfectly crafted into next summer’s magic, and that is the thought I like to keep foremost in my mind! I need to get out the fly boxes that house the tiny pale olives, sulfurs and terrestrials that are essential to that magic, to take stock of which patterns I need to tie, and perhaps put my mind to designing a new one.

Ah summer! You lie out there at the limits of my vision!

It is easy to sit and dream of balmy days upon bright water. My memories are full of sunlight and it’s sparkle on the gentle riffles, images of a secret wink of light beyond the edge of shade, my grip tightened on the cork. Though I feel blessed to wander rivers any day of the year, summer is my favorite season!

As I gazed at the warm brown cane I was taken there, crouching along the edge of a flat and mesmerized by an intermittent ripple in the current fifty feet away. A flick of my wrist and the thin gray line unrolls, my little fly settles gently and nearly vanishes in the drift. Time stops, until that ripple becomes a ring, and that warm brown cane turns to lightning in my hand!