2019: This Will Be Our Year

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The warmth of your love
Is like the warmth of the sun
And this will be our year
Took a long time to come
Don’t let go of my hand
Now darkness has gone
And this will be our year
Took a long time to come
I know I’m not the only person who was more than ready to kick 2018 out the door, and welcome in the promise of a new year.  Like a brand new pad of drawing paper, a brand new spiral notebook, a brand new computer with a virtually empty hard drive, a new year is a blank canvas, as yet untainted by politics or pain.
This last year, actually the year and change going all the way back to August 2017, has been a hard one for Fuzzy and me. We lost his mother, his father, and my stepfather. We also lost my last great-uncle, but that wasn’t a death that impacted me a great deal, except that I’m sad he was sick and suffering at the end.
And then there was my knee surgery.
While my mother was here, I was confronted with the fact that, as much as I’ve improved, I’m nowhere close to being completely healed. I found out earlier today that I did not make it into a writing residency I applied for, and my first reaction was not disappointment, but relief. I’m not ready, yet, to be traipsing around a walking city without Fuzzy’s help and support.
And I won’t forget
The way you held me up when I was down
And I won’t forget the way you said,
“Darling I love you”
You gave me faith to go on
And speaking of help and support, I want to thank all my friends and family who have been with me on the journey through PT, and on the expanded journey of this podcast. Five years ago, when Nuchtchas told me about the Dog Days of Podcasting, I thought no one would care what I wrote, or listen to what I had to say. I’d probably have more listeners than Nutty and my mom if I bothered to make regular episodes (goal for 2019 – one a month) or tell people about it (like many people, I’m great at pushing other people’s art, and really bad at sharing my own), but the act of creation is often its own reward.
So, I wanted to take a moment and say thank you to ALL the dog days participants – those who did only August, and those who did something in December as well. Your comments, your mentions, your willingness to participate when I ask for volunteers – those mean so much. And your own podcasts make me smile, laugh, think, and wish I were on the ocean. This includes you Michael Butler – I listen to every episode. Really. I’m not naming any other names because I don’t want to miss anyone.
But also thank you to my other friends – Debra, Becca, Clay, Jancis, Fran, Selena, KM, Stones, Katie, OC, the entire Klingon Marauders fleet on Timelines, my cousins, Michelle, Kerrin, David, and Shirley, and my husband’s aunt Kathy. My own aunties, Patricia and Dee, and my local friends Kathy, Scott, Ben, Ian, Kimberlyn, and Trenton. You’ve listened to me whine, laughed when I was funny, provided encouragement when I needed it, and generally just been there.
And a special shout-out to my Mom. Because even though we push each others buttons the way only a mother and daughter can, she’s still my hero.
To the people who read my stuff wherever it’s posted and published, to the people who listen, to the people who just ARE.
Thank you.
Now we’re there and we’ve only just begun
This will be our year
Took a long time to come
In the poem “Story Water” Rumi wrote:

Water, stories, the body,
all the things we do, are mediums
that hide and show what’s hidden.

Study them,
and enjoy this being washed
with a secret we sometimes know,
and then not.

 

Thank you for sharing your stories, both fiction and not. I hope to hear more from you in 2019.

 

Thank you for listening to mine. I hope to share more in 2019.

 

This will be our year – all of us.

 

This will be our year
Took a long time to come

“This Will Be Our Year” was originally by The Zombies.

The Eighth Day After – Coffee Cake

Entenmanns

 

The eighth day after Christmas, before they could suspect
I bundled up the…
Eight maids a-milking
Nine ladies dancing
Ten lords a-leaping
Eleven pipers piping
Twelve drummers drumming
(Well, actually, I kept one of the drummers)
And sent them back collect

I wrote my true love we are through love
And I said in so many words
Furthermore your Christmas gifts were for the birds

– The Twelve Days After Christmas, by Frederick Silver

My earliest memories revolve around my grandmother’s dining table. Laughing aunts and uncles and cousins would sit around the table talking as loudly with their hands as they did with their voices. Some nights the Canasta cards were brought out, other nights the game was Pinochle or for us non-cardplayers, Scrabble was the game of choice. Inevitably though, whether there were two people at that table or twelve, my grandmother would announce that she wanted a ‘little something.’

Invariably that ‘little something’ would be dessert.

And more often than not, the dessert would be an Entenmann’s coffeecake. The kind with a crumb topping and pastry cheese filling. That taste, slightly metallic from the foil tray, but always just enough sweetness to temper the strongest of coffees (or the brattiest of little girls) was the taste of my childhood. I remember it as strongly as I do my grandfather’s raisin bread or my grandmother’s meatballs or her recipe for pasta e fagiolli, which, by the way, is nothing like the swill they serve at the Olive Garden.

For Christmas this year, my friend Fran in Massachusetts sent me not one, not two, but three Entenmann’s Cheese-filled Crumb Coffee Cakes. Two immediately went into the freezer, to be saved until I just can’t stand it anymore. The third, we cut into almost immediately. Even my mother, who doesn’t eat carbs (she says), couldn’t resist the siren call of this coffee cake.

You see, they don’t sell it in my part of Texas. Believe me, I’ve looked. And even in California, it was a rare thing to find.

They say you can’t go home again, but sometimes, home can come to you, and when it does, it’s packaged in a white and blue box.

 

 

 

 

A Glimpse of Stocking

stockingsMy friend Nuchtchas has been talking about her holiday traditions as part of her audio advent project, and one of her recent topics was stockings. She asked the rest of us to share pictures of our Christmas stockings, but we haven’t even begun to decorate this year. Partly that’s because I’m just not feeling terribly Christmassy, but mostly it’s because we’re waiting til my mother is here with us, so she can participate.

So, the picture I’ve provided is of last year’s Christmas stockings. Two fuzzy stockings we bought at Target several years ago and decorated (badly) ourselves. These are the stockings that Fuzzy and I have used throughout our time in Texas – about fourteen years – but I can’t remember exactly when we got them.

I don’t remember my earliest Christmas stockings. I remember getting gum and small toys, and from about the age of nine on, a small wheel of brie. But I don’t remember the stockings themselves, except that my mother’s first husband’s mother knitted them for the three of us right after mom got married, but misspelled my name, so for years I had a love-hate relationship with it.

More recently, okay, more like ten years ago, we bought three or four stockings at Cracker Barrel when I knew I’d be hosting Christmas for my parents and my aunt. These are brightly colored with penguins, snowmen and a Santa Claus figure on them. These are our guest stockings, the ones we fill for whomever is spending Christmas with us in any given year.

But this year is different.

This year I bought new stockings.

This year, I’m trying to retain our most important family traditions, but alter them enough that the absence of my stepfather isn’t felt so keenly. The penguin stocking was always his when he visited. I can’t bear to see it right now.

Instead, I have three red and white knitted stockings waiting to be hung. They’re all slightly different, but they came in a set, and I think they’ll work nicely.

As for the not-decorating thing… when I was a kid we almost never decorated until around this part of December, after school was out for the holidays. While I have decorated as early as Thanksgiving once in a while, I typically prefer to wait a week or two into the month. We leave our tree and lights up until Epiphany, and I’d get sick of it all if I had it around for five or six weeks instead of two or three.

In the years we went to Mexico, I’d still decorate, partly because we’d be home and entertaining friends for part of the season, and partly because coming home a few days before New Year’s to an undecorated house is pretty depressing.

In Mexico, as I’ve already talked about this year, we also have furry stockings that we decorated on a visit many years ago.

And aside from that, my only real memory of stockings is one time when I was seven or eight that I was delighted by the fact that I had so much stuff in my stocking that it had fallen from where it was hanging. (I’m pretty sure I commented that my mother’s was kind of limp. As kids do.)

Noche de Paz

La Paz Xmas

Noche de paz, noche de amor,

Todo duerme en rededor

entre los astros que esparcen su luz

viene anunciando al niño Jesús

Brilla la estrella de paz

Brilla la estrella de paz.

 

The bonfire is warm and the salt pines shelter us from the wind. We’re given wine and cheese, chicken mole and freshly pressed corn tortillas. The food is simple, but the starry sky is glorious, and if we strain, we can hear the water lapping at the shore.

 

It is the first night of our first Christmas trip to Mexico.

 

Christmas Eve, we join other members of the community where my parents now live. We drink homemade Rompope which is sort of like really lethal eggnog, and also nothing like it. It’s made with rum and stirred with stalks of sugar cane. When we’re buzzed enough, we go caroling through the sandy streets, but the entire group only knows two songs: Jingle Bells – which we sing in English – and Silent Night – which we sing in English and Spanish.

 

Noche de paz, noche de amor,

Todo duerme alrededor,

Sólo velan en la oscuridad

Los pastores que en el campo están;

Y la estrella de Belén

Y la estrella de Belén.

 

The years pass and our visits to Mexico change. Instead of drunken caroling we invite some of the post-doc students my stepfather is working with to join our family celebrations. One of them, an Italian woman of roughly my age, brings her guitar.

 

We spend Christmas Eve decorating cheap felt stockings with puffy paints, while we listen to the Lessons and Carols service from England streaming over the speakers of an ancient HP laptop, too kludgy to be used as anything but a music player.

 

Our repertoire of carols expands by one: Happy Christmas, War is Over. Our new Italian friend strums her guitar while we all sing along. The next morning, though skeptical, she comes to breakfast in her pajamas and sits on the floor just like the rest of us as we open presents. The youngest of us is in our thirties, but we are happy and the coffee is hot, and we laugh like children.

 

Noche de paz, noche de amor;

Todo duerme alrededor;

sobre el Santo Niñito Jesús

Una estrella esparce su luz,

Brilla sobre el Rey,

Brilla sobre el Rey.

We miss a few Mexican Christmases, hosting some here in our own home in Texas, and visiting Fuzzy’s family for others. In the years we’re not together Fuzzy and I go to midnight mass at the local Episcopal church, which actually begins at ten-thirty. Some years there is carol singing before the formal service, but even when there isn’t, we pass the flame from hand to hand in the darkened church, and somehow, the simple act of voices raised in song is both mysterious and magical.

 

We didn’t know our last Christmas in Mexico would be the last Christmas. We are welcomed into my parents’ friends’ homes for a midnight dinner on Christmas eve, and a boozy brunch on Christmas day, and wherever we go, people wish us Felices Fiestas – Happy Holidays.

 

That last Christmas, I fry latkes, brought to mark my stepfather’s Jewish heritage, and we eat them with smoked salmon and leftover cranberry sauce. The lights twinkle across the bay. The sound of the wind makes us almost believe it’s cold outside, and we finish the evening reading and sipping tea and talking.

 

Noche de paz, noche de amor

Todo duerme alrededor

Fieles velando allí en Belén

Los pastores, la Madre también

Y la estrella de paz,

y la estrella de paz.

 

My stepfather left this world in July, and my mother has their house in Mexico listed for sale. She’s due here in a week, and we’ve waited to decorate until she gets here. Mostly, we don’t really feel like Christmas – or I didn’t, but then today in the chocolate shop I saw truffles made with mole and as we walked back to the car with our purchases, I felt like maybe Christmas was coming this year, after all.

 

Brilla la estrella de paz

Brilla la estrella de paz.

 

 

 

 

Fool’s Gold

georgetownlake

We weren’t supposed to ride our bikes out to the reservoir. Certainly, we weren’t supposed to play on its rocky shore, but it was 1977 or 78 and we were innocent – the world was innocent – or at least, it seemed that way.

And so we rode our bikes along the frontage rode of the highway, mine still bearing the red, white and blue streamers from the 4th of July bike parade, and we parked them on reasonably level ground. Then we took old beach towels, purloined snacks, and cans of soda from our baskets and set up a sort of picnic area, before we went close to the water.

We were imaginative seven- and eight- year olds. Jeff decided that the big chunks of dried mud from where the water had receded over the summer were actually fossilized dinosaur turds. “Boys are so gross,” Monica and I said to each other behind his back. But out loud we asked, “What kind of dinosaur?”

“It’s from the Megapod,” Jeff insisted. “It’s Megapodtastic!”

“More like mega-disgusting,” I said. But it was Georgetown, Colorado. We’d all been to the natural history museum in Denver on school trips. We knew that dinosaurs had lived here once, just like we were certain the cannibalistic Goat-Man still haunted the woods outside town. It could have been ancient dino-dung, or at least, our child-brains didn’t immediately reject the idea.

We continued to enjoy the afternoon. A lonely kayaker appeared on the far side of the reservoir at one point. We hadn’t seen him arrive, and we never saw him leave, he just ghosted across our field of vision the same way a shark will sometimes swim near you without actually bothering you. You don’t see it, but you know you’re not alone.

“Maybe he’s searching for dinosaur bones,” I suggested, mostly kidding.

Maybe he’s fishing for the lake monster,” Jeff responded. “Hey, is it true you and Gil are going together?”

Gil was the older man in my life. A fourth-grader, to my second, and he’d asked me to go with him after the mandatory school square dance recital. Of course, in elementary school, going together didn’t mean much. We never touched, except in dance class, we never spent much time together. I think we sort of sat near each other at lunch. Whatever.

“Here,” Jeff opened a can of Mr. Pibb and handed it to me. It was still slightly cool. “See, it didn’t even explode. Told ya.”

I took a sip, just as Monica, who’d taken her shoes off and was dancing in and out of the water – even in the hottest part of summer, that reservoir was cold – shouted for us to join her. “Guys! Come here!! Look what I found!”

I took my soda with me as Jeff and I went to join her, looking down into the water, where she was pointing at gold sparkles on the rocks.

“What the-what the hey?” Jeff squatted down and pulled out a handful of the rocks. “It’s gold!” He said. “We’re gonna be rich!”

We immediately gathered as many of the glittery-gold rocks as our young hands could carry, stuffing our pockets and the baskets of our bikes. We ended up sharing my Mr. Pibb – all three of this – as we stared at our collection.

“Now what?” Monica asked.

“We go to the rock shop, and have Sidney tell us how much it’s worth. He sells gold nuggets. I bet he buys them, too,” Jeff said.

The ride back to town was longer and slower with our collection of rocks, but we didn’t mind. Jeff said he would use the money to hire a running coach – his older brother was a track star, and he wanted to be even better. Monica said she wanted the Barbie dreamhouse she’d been wishing for. Me? I didn’t know what to say. Admitting that all I wanted was books and games seemed wrong somehow.

But when we got to the rock shop, Sidney had bad news for us. Oh, he made a show of looking at each rock very carefully, but then he sat us at the table in the middle of his store, the one where the rock polisher was usually grumbling and burbling. “Bad news, kids. What you have isn’t gold. It’s mica?”

“Mica?” I asked.

“Some people call it ‘Fool’s Gold.’

“So, it’s not worth anything?” I asked. Well, one of us had to get all the information.

“‘Fraid not,” Sidney said. “But don’t feel bad. I have grown-ups bring this stuff in all the time. Why don’t you each choose a polished rock before you go, to remind you to keep exploring.”

We were disappointed, of course. I mean, we’d been millionaires for a whole hour and suddenly we were just normal kids again. Still, a free polished rock could not be turned down. “Thanks Sid,” Jeff said. “Thank you,” Monica added. “Thank you, Sidney,” I wrapped up.

We left his store with mostly empty pockets, and stood on the sidewalk, where our bikes were waiting, and the light was waning. “It’s getting late,” Monica said. “I should go.”

“Yeah, me, too,” I said. “Mom might let me put price-tags on stuff for extra money. You guys want to do something tomorrow?”

“We could go to the little park,” Jeff said. “I heard all the levels – ” He meant terraces but hadn’t yet learned that word – “are there to hide the fact that it’s an Indian burial ground.”

“Sure,” I said. “Maybe we’ll meet a ghost.”

Monica didn’t look thrilled by our idea. “I think I have to do stuff at home tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll let you know.”

But we knew she wouldn’t.

The three of us went in different directions. Jeff went down the dirt road that led to the neighborhood tucked into the edge of the woods. I’d ridden my bike down that road after twilight once and had been convinced the Headless Horseman was chasing me the whole way. Never mind that the Headless Horseman lived in New York, and not Colorado.

Monica went up the hill. Her family lived in a big old house, but it was creaky and leaning in places. I think the idea of hunting for ghosts didn’t appeal to her, because she lived with so many.  Visits to her house were hard because all they had to play with were half-complete board games, none of which were meant for only two people.

And I went back down the block, around the main square, and across the street to the building where my mother owned a store, and we lived in the apartment above it, but I knew better than to bring my bike in through the front. I locked it under the back stars behind the building, climbed up to the back entrance of our apartment, and walked through it, down the front stairs, and into the store.

Mom was finishing with a customer, but when they’d gone, she smiled at me. “You look tired and dirty,” she said. “What have you been up to today.”

“Out with Jeff and Monica,” I said. “We were seriously wandering and talking about stuff.”

Mom smiled. If she knew where our wanderings had taken us, she would not have been so pleasant.

“Go upstairs and clean up,” she said. “We’re driving to Idaho Springs tonight.”

“Idaho Springs? Why?”

“Because Floyd has the projector fixed and is doing the first weekend of Mad Movie Mayhem.”

“And we’re going? Really?”

“We’re going,” Mom said. “Really.”

I didn’t answer her. I just turned around and ran back upstairs to change. My dog greeted me at the door, and I brought her into my room with me. “Sorry we didn’t spend much time together today,” I told her as I ran my fingers through her curly white fur. The little park was within walking distance and had soft grass that was perfect for poodle paws. “But tomorrow is another day, and with any luck, you’ll get to come out with me then.”

Dinner Music

I wrote this after a trip back east in 2009, but if I posted it then, it got lost in an archive save, because I don’t have it anywhere. I found it when I was looking for a piece of flash-fiction to edit into something else, and decided to post it anyway.  Aunt Molly, mentioned in the piece, died in 2015 at the age of 105.


The comforting burbling of a percolating coffee pot is the bass note to a symphony played by silver, ceramic, and porcelain softly clinking against each other. It’s the kind of sound most people would never notice, but in an Italian family, the dining table isn’t just where food is spread, but where all the good conversation happens, and conversations like that don’t exist without coffee and pastry – cheesecake is preferred, but a crumb cake will do.

Last month, I spent eight days on the east coast, first at my aunt’s wedding, which occurred in a rambling old, cold summer house in Amagansett, NY, and then in and around a small fishing village in New Jersey, which was once mainly populated by summer folk as well, though now most of the homes are occupied year-round.

In both places, while there was singing to be heard, and various forms of recorded music as well, the melodies that mattered were those created as we sipped endless cups of coffee, nibbled on a broad array of desserts (including crumb cake), and chattered into the wee hours of the morning, picking up threads of conversations that had been dropped decades before, or simply starting new ones.

In an Italian-American family, all the good stuff happens after dinner, when the food has been cleared away, and dessert has largely dwindled to a few crumbs. As a child, I would have been sent to bed before any of the really dishy conversation, but I have fond memories of hunkering down on the red-carpeted steps of my grandmother’s house, hiding behind the tall hutch that was set against the staircase, listening to the mix of English spoken in a New Jersey Neopolitan accent and Italian uttered in short phrases and single words, that nevertheless managed to convey images of sunny hillsides, deep red wine, and round, ripe tomatoes.

I remember my grandfather’s voice, belting from the diaphragm as he told a story, or corrected someone else’s version of a tale, or merely laughed. I remember my grandmother referring to my older cousins, as well as my mother and her siblings, as scooch (pest) or scocciamento (pain in the ass – pr. scooch-a-mende), or merely referring to someone as a “miserable wretch.” I remember laughter, always laughter, even on the saddest days. The concept of laughter through tears might have been mentioned in the movie Steel Magnolias, but Italian-American women live it on a daily basis.

As I grew older, I was allowed to have a seat at the after-dinner table – to play my part in the “Coffee Klatsch Cantata,” as it were. I remember rousing games of Canasta and Scrabble, and I also remember hearing stories about relatives who often were only names to me, or faces in faded photographs.

Being back in New Jersey wasn’t just visiting, it was, in many senses, going home. My grandparents may no longer be on this Earth, but my great-aunt Molly is ninety-nine and a half years old, and still remembers every story, every relative, every connection. Sure, she can’t walk any more, but she still smells of Taboo perfume and rice pudding, is always impeccably dressed, and if she falls asleep in her easy chair listening to the Italian-language news on TV that’s okay, because if you put her at the kitchen table and hand her a cup of coffee, she’ll instantly be bright-eyed, alert, and ready to trade memory for memory until the last crumb of cake is gone, and the percolator has grown cold.

As much as the folk music and show tunes I still sing, this is the music I grew up with. The harmonies made not by strings and percussion, but by the rise and fall of voices in conversation while food is being shared around a kitchen table.

Autobiography in Pine

2004 Christmas Tree

My tree from 2004.

My autobiography will not be written on a computer, or disseminated in the form of a kindle file. It exists already in the collection of ornaments that have been lovingly cared for, some since before I was born.

My earliest Christmas memories are of decorating the tree with my mother. We would usually do this on a Friday or Saturday evening in December, with Christmas music playing in the background, and both of us singing along, my mother with… great enthusiasm.

As each ornament came out of the layers of tissue paper, my mother would tell me the story of where it came from. “This is the Santa Claus your grandfather brought home from Germany after the war,” she would say, or “this was attached to your very first Christmas present ever.”

Every year, our collection would increase by an ornament or two, usually as a souvenir of somewhere we went, or something we had done. As I grew older, the ornaments began to reflect my interests as well. The ice skates (both Mom and I love skating) were joined by books, hats, and an array of musical instruments. When Fuzzy proposed to me over my Christmas visit to South Dakota, my mother’s initial response was congratulatory, and then wistful: “I guess I’ll have to wrap your ornaments separately this year.”

Twenty Christmases later, my collection of ornaments has grown exponentially. Our first tree was barely full, and the tree we had in our condo was three feet tall and in a pot. This year, we have a pre-lit plastic tree with seven million tips (this may be an exaggeration) that is seven and a half feet tall (that is not an exaggeration), and I still feel like there aren’t enough branches.

Last year, my mother sent some of her collection to me; she was downsizing to accommodate her smaller house and slightly advanced age (she’ll be 66 in February), and it was a kind of virtual reunion, seeing some old favorites and meeting some new pieces from her life in Mexico.

I’ve never done a count of all my ornaments – there are more than a hundred and less than five thousand – but I know when one is missing, as if a paragraph or a chapter was accidentally deleted from a favorite novel.

My ornaments are my story, my autobiography, told in red and green, wood and glass, and set against a background of pine.

Holidailies 2015

Baby Grand

The piano came with the house.

They found it discarded in the basement, the soundboard cracked.

She’d always wanted a piano, so they hoisted it up, and put it back together, had it tuned and timed.

She didn’t know how to read music, but she could play by ear, her elegant fingers coaxing beautiful sounds from the cast-off instrument.

If anyone else had bought the house…
If they didn’t live in reasonably humid New Jersey…
If music wasn’t as much a part of his soul as it was hers…

But that did, and they do, and it is.
Baby grand.

It’s PEER not PI-ERRE

Pencil Case

I learned the state capitals from a pencil case. It was deep cherry red, with the map of the United States outlined in raised white lines, two windows on the sides, and wheels to adjust the text appearing within. Change the capital, and the state would flip, and vice versa.

I remember reading the combinations: Albany, New York; Dover, Delaware.

(My mother used to sing the song “What Did Della Ware?”)

Harrisburg, Pennsylvania; Nashville, Tennessee; Pierre, South Dakota.

I found it very jarring when I moved to South Dakota to be with Fuzzy, and learned the locals pronounce it “Peer.”

Prompt: Pencil Case / Source @SSMindSchool

Fishing With Grandpop

Rod and Reel My friend Debra is hosting a project called Summer Love Notes (it started about ten days ago), and I’m one of the participants, which means I’ve been dwelling on memories of All Things Summer as I’ve tried to figure out what to write about.

One of my fondest childhood memories is fishing with my grandfather.

I’m not entirely certain when I became his fishing buddy, but I know I was no older than four the first time he took me to the pier. I remember the sweet scents of tar and wood, and the tang of salt in the air. I remember sitting on his tackle box, and wearing a fishing hat that would never be as weathered or as storied as his.

I remember stopping at the bait store on the way out to the fishing beach, and I remember stopping at Stewart’s for root beer ( in real glass mugs) and crinkle cut fries (in a paper boat) on the way home (served by carhops, delivered on a tray that clipped to the window).

I remember the squirmy, slippery fish flipping, flopping, and flailing on the dock once we reeled them out of the water, and I remember my grandfather knocking them out as quickly as possible.

Once we caught a dogfish (a small shark) and I remember seeing it’s teeth snapping at anything it thought it could reach. You couldn’t retrieve the hook from those and let it go, you had to dangle it from the line and snip the thread and let it fall, back into the ocean for a slow death, or into a handy trash bin for a faster one. Do fish feel pain? Do I really want to know?

Probably not.

I remember my grandfather cleaning the fish (Atlantic blue fish, most of the time) and my grandmother cooking it, serving it with fresh, steamed spinach and baked potatoes that had been wrapped in tin foil and cooked on the grill. “Watch for pins and needles,” she’d warn, referring to the bones in the fish.

What’s weird though, is that I don’t remember actually, you know, fishing. Only the activities around the actual baiting of hooks and casting of lines.

But I remember my grandfather’s hat, and his work shoes and his strong, brown hands, thick with callouses, and etched with history.

Fishing with my grandfather was one of my favorite parts of my childhood summers.

 

 

Photo Credit: juliasv / 123RF Stock Photo