The Waiting Is The Hardest Part

I can hear that line over and over, Tom Petty’s signature whine… Yea, it’s hard indeed.

I sat out on the porch yesterday afternoon, once the sun came through the clouds: eighty-four degrees there in my old chair; March in the Catskills. I almost tasted a cold, crisp Cold Snap rolling down my tongue, but that has to wait too. I simply sat there, feeling what felt like an early summer afternoon, watching the whisps of clouds glide over the top of Point Mountain.

I can’t quite to make the usual plans that I would be plotting daily as we are coasting toward mid-March. There are too many pressing things that I have to try to get done.

I’d simply dream back into one of these unseasonably warm days in March, wandering along Big Spring, back before things got so damned complicated. There was a time when I’d stalk along those meadows, watching every inch of the bottom, a shine beside a weed edge, evidence that a big rainbow was lurking…

Of course, the take obviously wasn’t a guarantee, not even with the three-weight I would have along on a winter’s day. One of those insane fish would go berserk if you did get a little hook in his jaw! That shallow, clear water you would just watch those ripping flashes of all those colors and a boiling furrow in the water as it streaked away. They always knew where the next weed bed was, even if the one they wanted was seventy yards away… yea, the one with a cluster of big chunks of limestone in the middle of a big ball of weeds. A trout measured in pounds on a size 20 hook and a 6X tippet, and a prayer!

I thought it was complicated back then, but it wasn’t turned out that way. Funny how your perspective changes.