Lucky Strikes

A rush of childhood memories sometimes pierces the busyness of my life. I especially love those times that call up the outdoors. Yesterday, prompted by a photo posted on a friend’s Facebook page, I relived a small-boyhood experience of walking in early dawn light through lush, wet pasture before the sun’s bright rays broke over the horizon. The night’s heavy dew soaked my jeans almost up to my knees, but I was keen in pursuit of the giant fish of my imagination, cane pole and line over my shoulder and my other hand carrying a milk pail of teeming red wigglers that would soon become bait on my hook and line with its red-and-white bobber.

My tall, maternal grandfather had dug the worms and covered them with a bit of fresh-dug barnyard earth, and now he walked alongside with a fishing rod in one hand, the legs of his bib overalls tucked into milk-barn ‘Wellies’ and his thick shock of graying hair covered by his familiar felt hat. The smell of his Lucky Strike smoke sometimes overpowered the inevitable earthy scent of fresh cow patties we’d encounter on our way down to the fishing hole.

“Watch out! Don’t cut your foot!” he’d tease with a glimmer in his eyes if I got too close. Other times, he’d give serious guidance or advice in his spare way, never one to waste words — each one “told,” in the E.B. White sense.

Lines in the water, and seeing me safely absorbed in watching both bobbers with the thrill of anticipation, he’d mosey somewhere close by to a tree to cut a limber, thin branch with a ‘y’ near its stouter end, using his Old Timer pocketknife. When the first catch was landed — a nice  bream or mud cat — he’d show me how to slide the long end of the branch into the fish’s gill and out its mouth – the branch our rudimentary stringer – then gently slide the fish down to the ‘y’ in the branch. With luck, I’d get to carry it back to the farmhouse loaded with our success, grinning from ear to ear, proud as a peacock.

As we made our way across the pasture to and from the fishing hole, we’d hear the occasional car or truck motoring up the concrete hill of Highway 71 in the rural distance – a distance now dwarfed by the passage of time and space, covered with commercial buildings and homes across from the Northwest Arkansas Mall, and now burdened with the constant drone of heavy traffic. Good ol’ days … shrouded in the mists of memory.

Carpe diem. Vita brevis!

© March 22, 2019, by Michael E. Stubblefield. All rights to my work reserved. Photo credit: Unknown.