I Don’t Do Resolutions

New Year’s Resolutions are a joke. An annual running gag. If there is anything you really want to do, make a New Year’s Resolution to give it up. A half-dozen years ago, I made a New Year’s Resolution to give up making New Year’s Resolutions. Thus far, I have kept it.

I find it’s more productive to wait until a situation prompts me to say, and mean, “This has got to change!” As the joke goes, the light bulb has to really want to change. This can’t be dictated by the calendar. It happens when a certain threshold is reached. Sometime during the holiday rush, I hit that threshold with my incredibly cluttered office (“Office/library/sitting room/computer room/fly tying area”). It’s taken awhile, but I discovered today that there is a desk under that pile of papers waiting to be filed. At this point, one more hour of work will see the last of the papers filed as needed and various boxes of supplies in the closet or storage area. Another day, and I can place my fly-tying supply order to be ready for this year’s round of shows and festivals. Who knows, I may even be able to use my newly-uncovered fly tying desk.

Through the course of 2016 I put a number of items on my mental ToDo list that might be good resolutions… and, perhaps, in the non-annual, non-January-first sense, they are. Some are new, others just reinforce lessons I knew, but neglected.

•       Listen. Determine what’s important to the other person. If you help, make sure it’s the help they want or need, not the help your ego wants to give them.
•      Be kind. It’s free, and it matters.
•     Never be too busy to take time for yourself. Spend it doing something you are passionate about, whether it’s hiking or wine-tasting, or whatever. No excuses; no waiting for someone else to be free to go along, no whining about cost, lack of preparation, lack of equipment, or travel distance. If these are really an issue, spend some time getting ready. But not too much! Chances are, if you just do it, you’ll find these obstacles don’t really exist.
•      Be aware. How much beauty and joy do you miss by going through life with tunnel-vision? Stop. Take a breath. Use your senses. Be amazed!
•    Be organized, with both your possessions and your time. You’ll find this gives you more space for creativity and more time for random, impulsive fun.
•      Life is uncertain. Order a donut with your coffee, or eat dessert first. Take that vacation. Binge-watch your favourite old TV series. Sign up for the class you always wanted to take. Don’t guilt-trip yourself fretting over your diet, what’s healthy or not, exercising, and other peoples’ expectations of you.
•       Pick a cause and work for it. Teach someone something you know well. This is your legacy to the world. Knowledge is useless unless it is used or shared. It cannot be hoarded.
•     The broad tides of history don’t care what flotsam they sweep away. Fretting about them is useless. Be alert for what little you can do to alter their course, and prepared to withstand them when they strike you. For withstand them you will, although it may be by means you could never imagine.
•    Think for yourself. Don’t stereotype or categorize; take people, issues, and ideas one at a time, each on its own merits. Use reason to make decisions. Consider the opinions of others, but also consider the source.
•      Your loved ones are your strength, your comfort, and your reason for living. But if you’re not on the list of your own loved ones, you can do nothing for the rest of them.
•     Back to basics. Whether you are talking about cooking, theology, or your lifestyle, it’s important to go back to the basics once in a while. You may find that you’ve strayed so far from those basics you have become their opposite.
•     Learn to say NO to things that other people find important. Their cause may be a good one, but it’s theirs, not necessarily yours. It’s easy to sink under the burden of other peoples’ priorities, at the expense of your own.
•     Be truthful, but also remember: It’s as important to avoid unkind truths as deliberate lies. Think before you speak. Your criticism may be the truth, but it is an opinion. Is there a way to phrase it positively? Will it hurt someone without fixing anything? If you’re not sure, “If you can’t say anything good, don’t say anything at all.”
• Treasure the small things. They just may be the most important things in your life.

The October Storm

          

  It was just two days ago: A golden afternoon in the mid-seventies, when I found myself with a couple of hours free in mid-afternoon and could not resist the temptation to spend them outdoors. So, dinner would be late. I had not had a single fishing outing in my beloved Pennsylvania Wilds this year, except when guiding other anglers. I yearned for the soothing solitude, the music of running water, and the beauty of wild brook trout and the autumn woods. There was an urgency to my need to get outdoors, a sensation with which I am all too familiar. Is it instinct, experience, or a combination of the two that tells me the October Storm is coming?

I passed up the nearby spots in favor of my favorite stretch of Kettle Creek, a good half-hour’s drive beyond the asphalt. I was not going to compromise quality for quantity, either. I rigged up my locally-crafted split bamboo rod and tied on a favorite attractor dry fly. Time was suspended for the next hour and a half, as I hiked in to my favorite spot, stalking with care, casting with delicacy, and being surprised with two spawn-ready male brookies in the twelve-inch class in addition to my usual seven-inchers. Beautiful, beautiful trout with bright colors overlaid with silver, muscular and glistening in my hands as I slipped them back into their natural element to continue replenishing their rare and precious kind.

            The sun slipping behind the south-western ridge signaled the end of this glorious interlude, but I treasured every minute of the hike out and the drive home, amid the fall colors I sensed would be fleeting indeed. It is an uncomfortable talent to have, the ability to know that something is ending. Sadness, bitter-sweet, colored my entire afternoon, as I appreciated what was both my first and final solo fishing trip of the season.

            Late that night, the October Storm blew in; literally, ripping down my birdfeeders, support cable and all. Soaking rain has continued ever since, lightning illuminating a landscape being stripped of its color. The temperatures are gradually dropping, and for the first time I saw the snowflake icon on the day-by-day weather forecast. They say the rain will end sometime tomorrow, to be followed by our first temperatures in the 20’s this year. This is it: the October Storm, the one that ends autumn and begins winter here in upstate Pennsylvania.

            That’s all it takes here, one storm, that always comes sometime in October (usually earlier than this year). One day, busses of “leaf peepers” cruise the local roads, stopping here and there to snap pictures, taking home a lasting memory of beauty. The October Storm hits, and the day after that, the trees are all but bare, the muted duns of the hillsides broken only by the occasional stubborn birch late to turn, or the candle-flame shape of a tamarack.

            As I gaze out the window at the downpour, I am struck, as I always am, by the ephemeral, fragile nature of beauty. One storm, and it’s gone. My comfort is that it is followed by a different, subtler form of beauty, there for those who can appreciate it. Anyone can see the gaudy glories of autumn’s peak, but the true artist also values the quiet, soul-soothing shades that follow the October Storm.

Summertime Blues

I remember, as a child down South, lying in my underwear on the upstairs landing floor, under the six-foot-wide whole-house fan, panting. Theoretically, the fan was set to suck air out of the house and into the attic, thus out the vents, keeping the house cool. In practice, it just moved hot air out and hot air in. But at least the stifling air was moving, evaporating a little of the sweat from my suffering body.

You see, I sweat. Not the ladylike slight sheen of moisture, but great trickling runnels of perspiration that soak my hair and clothing. I hate it. Hate sweating, hate the enervating heat and the mental and physical torpor brought on by high humidity. I’m just not a summer person.

Admittedly there are good things about summer. There are fairs and festivals; lakes that invite people to swim, fish, or kayak their waters; fresh fruits and veggies in season including home grown tomatoes, thus BLTs a-plenty; ice cream; flowers, birdsong, and young animals; that most under-rated pleasure, porch-sitting; geocaching; and my heating fuel usage drops to zero, although the budget payment keep on coming. Roads, even the most obscure dirt ones, are free of snow cover and drivable, except for areas under construction. But these pleasures are only enjoyable to me when temperatures are below 80 or so.

Because of allergies as well as this sensitivity to heat, I lived and (mostly) worked in an air-conditioned environment from the age of 17 until my retirement forty years later. Any time I could afford to choose I drove an air-conditioned car.

I opted to move north after retirement. This was deliberate, because of my life-long loathing of heat. My house is almost at the summit of one of the higher parts of the Allegany Plateau. It is normally 5 to 10 degrees cooler here than in the south-east part of the state where I spent my working years. With the advance of age, the upper limit of my “comfort zone” rose from perhaps 75 to 80 or even 85, depending on humidity, which also is usually lower at this altitude than in the Delaware Valley. Who needs air conditioning in the mountains? It’s a matter of Ridge-runner pride to sneer at air conditioning. Most of the summer (at least, normal summers), I accept this policy even though I don’t exactly embrace it. I open my windows and turn on my four ceiling fans, one in each room.

Even so, there are days I still miss my air conditioner more than I can say.

This summer, as I predicted when winter lingered well into May, is hotter and dryer than is normal. My grass is dried to a tan crisp (Yay! No mowing! Well, that’s one advantage.) and I feel like I am, too. My energy meter is stuck on zero. Day after day topping 90 makes me dread getting up in the morning, and at night I lie under my slowly-moving ceiling fan, drenched in my own sweat, unable to drop off to sleep until the temperature drops to around 70. Between night after sleep-deprived night, and panting and sweating through each day, it would be a marvel if I got anything done under these conditions.

Yet there are always demands: Organize this event. Come sign your book here, or fish there. There are festivals and music events, plays and market days, that I don’t have the least inclination to attend when I’m panting like an old coon hound and sweating like a stevedore. I pray to the weather gods to send a cool front, with accompanying rain and breezes. Or whatever they can spare to drop the temperature and humidity even a little.

           Anyone know a reliable rain dance? If not, COME ON, AUTUMN!

Six Degrees of Muggles

       

Just to the left of the flag is the historical marker where I had my strange muggle encounter...

    
      March was a brutal month, starting with the death of a fishing buddy’s husband whom I considered a friend; then my housemate Maggi’s mother passed on quite unexpectedly, my pen pal for over forty years; most recently, my sister’s mother-in-law, who graciously hosted me for a number of holidays, succumbed to a fast-growing cancer. These tragedies come in threes, it’s said, and these were three deeply-felt losses. A week after returning from Maggi’s mom’s memorial service, it was an anticipated pleasure to travel for a more pleasant reason.

       The Sporting Gentleman in Glen Mills, PA was hosting the Launch Event for my book, “A Woman’s Angle: Celebrating 20 Years of Women Fly Fishing.” I arranged a couple days’ stay in the area. Part of the preparations, of course, was getting on the Geocaching website to look for caches in Glen Mills. There were two right along Glen Mills Road, one at an intersection I figured would be my turn for driving to the fly shop. I downloaded those and a few others close by into my GPS. This is standard practice for me when I’m visiting a new town, and I had never been to TSG’s new location.

      On the day of the event I gassed my car at the corner of Route 1 and the connecting road, then turned on my GPS. I had allowed enough time to grab the cache before I was due to arrive, and having the Garmin set to guide me to the intersection would help me find the fly shop. Just find the cache, then turn onto Glen Mills Road, how simple is that? 1.69 miles down the connecting road to that intersection, I noticed as I pulled out of the gas station.

       The numbers counted down as I got closer and closer to the cache. A half mile; five hundred yards; three hundred yards; two hundred feet… I could see the bridge, and a parking lot conveniently close to the cache location.

       A parking lot with a very familiar sign: What a coincidence! The fly shop was right there, when I expected it to be a quarter-mile away. A dozen folks were out on the lawn grass-casting in the triangle between the stream, the road, and the parking lot as I pulled in and turned off the car. I knew they were concentrating on their back-casts and would be totally unaware of my geocaching antics. Less than fifty feet to the cache.

       I casually walked towards the bridge, spotting the historical marker mentioned in the cache description on the far side. A quick check for traffic, and I jogged across the narrow bridge. There was a crude pull-off by the sign, and I walked back and forth checking the bouncy coords, then stopped to consider possible hiding places while looking intently at the sign as if reading it. In the stonework bridge balustrades? Stuck magnetically to the bridge framework? Under the bridge itself? A well-worn path led in that direction.

       A car horn made me pause, then a sedan pulled into the pull-off. Nothing to do with me, I thought. It’s probably a fisherman, overflow from the shop’s parking lot. A guy got out and walked towards me. Rather than continue towards the cache and possibly reveal its location, I paused and looked at him approaching. He looked vaguely familiar.

         “Do you remember me? It’s Dan, Maggi’s cousin.”

       My head spun. I had met this fellow briefly at her mother’s memorial service; we’d had a discussion on minimum-flow regulations on the Upper Delaware River and I’d gotten the impression he was a resident of the Hudson Valley north of the Catskills. He’d bought a copy of my book. Maggi and I had spoken of him afterwards: the ‘family oddball’ of his (and our) generation, never married, just the sort of guy that I would normally find attractive. No, I’ve learned that lesson. Besides, I’ll never see him again, I had responded to her teasing. Yeah, right. And here he was, a week later.

      I don’t know what expression was on my face when I made this unlikely connection. It must have been favorable, because his eyes lit up and he gave me a hug.

       “What are you doing here?” I couldn’t help but blurt out tactlessly.
       “I live here. I shop here at this fly store.”

       Say WHAT? I didn’t say. Instead, “They are holding my Book Launch Event today. That’s what I’m here for.”

      “No kidding! I’ve been flipping through your book, reading whatever caught my eye, and I really love it.” The conversation went on, and I learned that he’s on the watchdog council for the Chester Creek Watershed. He gestured at the creek beside us as he enumerated its problems.

       About then Christine came across the bridge, having noticed us there.
       “Here comes the boss, I have to go,” I commented.

     “Chris!” he greeted her. “I love my Filson fleece vest! It’s the best ever!” He posed in model position.

       “I’m so glad, Dan,” she said. They were obviously old friends.

     My brain felt like it was replaying a scene from the “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.” Improbability sum complete, a nasal computer voice said complacently in my head as I followed Christine over the bridge and, behind me, Dan’s car pulled out.

     Was it Karma? Was Maggi’s mom looking down from Heaven, rolling on a cloud laughing, the first-ever Catholic angel Yenta? Was this (horrifying thought to my happily-single self) destiny with violins and a shower of paper-heart confetti? Will I ever hear from this guy again? Do I want to??

     I’m certain of just one thing: I never had a chance to find that cache. I was muggled, perhaps the strangest muggling experience I’ll ever have.