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Flyfisher
My grandmother was a fly-fisher before arthritis twisted her hands and knees and back into shapes only fit for sitting and watching television.
Have you ever seen fly-fishing? It is older than Jesus and done the same way today as it was yesterday and 100 and 1,000 and 5,000 years ago.
Old cane pole with a ball of thick twine cast out on smooth water, floating like a tasty bug, like ringing the dinner bell for trout or bass.
The fly’s the thing: colored string and bits of cloth tied around a barbed hook to look like an insect. The best ones, the real ones, are made by hand.
My grandmother made her own flies before arthritis stole the deft talent of her fingers. I found a leather case full of her hand-made flies not long ago.
They had eyes, and wings, and legs, and looked for all the world like bugs until you got careless and hooked yourself accidentally in the thumb.
Tying the fly is the hardest trick to master. The string must be wound and wound round the shaft of the hook, secure against bass bites.
It takes time, and patience, and care, and love. In that leather satchel I found were flies that surely took her hours and days and weeks to craft.
My grandmother was a fly-fisher before arthritis and a bronchial infection and cracked ribs from a fall and dehydration and kidney trouble and stroke
and the death of her husband of 61 years last December put her into the hospital bed I saw her in last night, clad in white like a cloud.
She called me Michael, which is not my name, but that was fine with me. I held her wrinkled, spotted hand in mine and marveled at her fingers.
Those fingers had tied my heart to hers, surely and deftly over years, with patience and love, so cleanly and completely that I never saw the hook coming into me.
My grandmother was a fly-fisher until she just got too old to stand in the lake and cast the line. I know she misses the thrill of a strike, the silence of wind
on water. She lies now in a hospital bed in Brighton, unsure of where she is or why, fidgety and ill, lonely for the company of her husband, whom she hooked first.
The bright colored twine she used to wrap us all in her love has begun to loosen, breath by breath, layer by layer, wrap by wrap by wrap. She hooked
us all and we hooked her, a family of fly-fishers entwined in history. But like all human fish she will soon slip the hook and disappear into dark water.
My grandmother was a fly-fisher, a catcher of souls in her own quiet, stubborn, loving, bemused Irish way. I do not know of one fish that slipped through her nets.
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