Rising trout, November dusk....

I just had a huge WTF moment. I need to put that on ignore and concentrate on a couple other things that are more important....

...like watching the trout rise in Valley Creek today. I wonder sometimes if I should pack some fishing gear in the back of the van, since the stream is a short stroll from where I work. I stopped by there this afternoon and was mesmerized by a pair of trout rising. One flashed, broke the surface, and was gone by the time the stream settled back into its flow....

and then there is a moment at dusk, maybe 5 years ago, that came to mind while I was in the woods. One afternoon I took the boys to a local park, and some one was flying a remote control helicopter in the field for their kids. Mine blended with his, and as darkness fell, I will never forget G's delighted squeals, his mouth a happy smudge in white as detail was lost in the waning late afternoon light...

and I think of my own life in moments as these, as moments that I can sometimes cross reference to a time and place in my life....sometimes I can't. That's the hard part about getting older, random beautiful moments half remembered like a dream, and the harder you try to remember the particulars, the more it recedes.

Thinking, too, of imprinting, how I am so much like my dad, not necessarily because I remember, but because who he was is somehow bound up in who I am. And how much like my mother I am, by dint of necessity, how tough she is, how tough she taught me to be, and how she influenced my own parenting. I am my father, but I have become my mother, because I had to, and I am not at all sorry.

Thank God I have her laugh. Thank God I have her sense of humor. Both get me through a lot.

But I still ride a lot of it through on dad's shoulders.