Attribution: USFWS Mountain Prairie, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, is unable to restrain leakage from the keeper’s memory bag:
“On rainy summer days when the haymows were full and the corn was nearly at its knee-high-by-the 4th goal, the farmers went fishing.
“They tied cane poles to the sides of their family sedans and drove up to Bear or Red Cedar lake and rented a wooden boat for $1 and rowed out on the water to troll for northern pike or dunk worms for bluegills.
“Hard-working, calloused, sunbaked people—mostly men, the fishing farmers let down their loads of responsibility, and if you were lucky enough to be a boy among them you began to see yet another way to celebrate life.
“On one of those rainy fishing days, the Gilbertsons caught a 20-pound northern, a monster of a thing that laid on the damp Gilbertson milkhouse floor until all the other farmers had come to gawk and admire it.
“The keeper can still see that big displayed northern, sprawled like something from another world and seeming to express dire disapproval of everything with its one visible eye.”
The keeper would tell Phyllis about the farmer rainy-day fishing but he has a feeling he might have already done so. However, on the chance that she might have forgotten some of the details, “Make sure you don’t forget the lunch Mom packed because it will be some of the best rainy day eating of your life!”
