Hooked on All Creatures Great and Small

     Lauren is 21!  We spent her significant birthday on a fishing trip.  She loved it and wants to live up in the Canadian wilderness. As a little girl, she wore a baseball hat with a stuffed fabric fish on it.  "The fishys in the lake will see my hat and say, 'Oh! There is Friend Walleye!' And they will want me to catch them so that they can be his friend!"  At that young age, actually removing a fish from the hook and filleting it would have required intense grief counseling. She loved and collected frogs, lizards, turtles, spiders (until dreaming about them one night) and any other living creature found around our home in the woods.  Once, she got a new lizard anole which quickly died (after the old one--Mr. Anole-- bit it's head off) Sad seven year old Lauren sobbed and sobbed, "Poor Mrs. Anole!  And poor Toachie! (a turtle that had died the year before) And then she wailed, "And POOR, POOR SANDY!" (her Dad's childhood dog...who died 35 years previously!)
     I remember pulling off a slimy leech that had lodged securely between her toes while swimming.  I flung it out into the grass.  Mistake.  She cried out, "Mom! Go find it!  It will die if it doesn't get back into the water!" Then she spent the afternoon searching the grass in case anyone else had flung leeches that needed rescuing.
     Tonight Lauren fried up our Canadian walleye and washed it down with a purchase from her inaugural trip to the liquor store:  'Black Toad dark ale.'
     Happy birthday, sweetie!
©2011  Jana B Patrick


http://www.lostislandlodge.com/ Lost Island Lodge, Ontario, Canada