and she said.. "how you interpret the dream is probably more important than the dream itself"

When I was younger I used to fish a lot. Bobbing worms, fly-casting, and even walking down a brook in two pairs of sweatpants, up to the waste in the freezing water of the spring thaw. Trout. Perch. Bass. Sunfish. Pike. I never kept them, well.. except maybe some trout. I never have been much of a hunter that way. Somehow it wasn't about the fish, all that fishing I did.

I ran up Mont Royal this weekend and I saw a little bit of all that fishing. The snow was melting down into the old stone gutters along the side of the road. It had rained the day before and the trees had that new smell to them - not new manufactured smell but that musty growing smell that spring always brings. Wet, damp, cold - but not too cold. The hay, too, a few bales spilled and trampled down on the dirt, reminded me of the lambs being born in the cold of a March night, so much so that they could see their breath, their first view of the world.

Sometimes it's the fishing I miss most about childhood. Everything else seemed to be go-go-go. Forts in the woods, crab-apple wars, building rafts, you name it. It never stopped. Chasing the dogs in the woods, being chased by the pigs. Somehow, fishing seemed to pull things down, slow things up, and generally provide a stage on which to sit and think for awhile - like David's stool, etched in stone.

I don't know why spring brings such encumbered thought, these feelings of contemplation so heavy that they cannot be carried around and must be abandoned to one spot and enjoyed only there. Spring usually has a sense of lightness, of new life and growth. Nevertheless the human spirit seems to need to turn inward upon itself at this time of year and perform a similar yet different type of growth. Each and every spring old things put away and never used are brought out, dusted off, and thrown away. Yardsales of the mind, heart, and soul are found around every corner. Cobwebs and dust bunnies are herded from the dark corners and light is shown anew in places we have almost forgotten in our very own houses and homes, and in our thoughts and feelings.

And through this all the sad little perch takes the brunt of this cleaning. A hook in the jaw is the cost of his snack and though he may wriggle and jump in the bottom of the canoe he is not fired up and hell-bent at revenge as one might personify; he is writhing in pain, the agony of blinding trust, the guilt of he who has been taken - a sucker!

I throw them back because I've been there. A sucker (one born every minute) I have succumb to the tasty thought of an on-the-house snack, the offer of a free lunch, surely we are all criminals of this on at least some occasion. Luckily my free lunches are rarely delivered on a hook ready to be set - betwixt knife and fork. No, for us more introspective of species (by which I mean those who speak inwardly and listen likewise to hear the echo) the bait is more obtuse, the tackle more twisted - meddle of a different nature all together, so to speak.

So perhaps, in the quiet of those simple creatures whose lives are hinged on the nibble of a nocturnal crawler, I can hear my thoughts more clearly and know which ones I must throw out. Maybe when sitting in a row boat in the middle of the night making mental caterwauls to the whiskered below or trolling slowly on a glassy-calm lake in a cool summer drizzle my mind is quicker to put broom to brush and rag to polish. I can't be sure why but these things help me think, the slapping of the water against the side of a boat, the click-click-click of the line as you pull it from the reel and the shwosh-shwosh of the fly line whipping through the air. Laxative for the brain. Like a social mixer, an elixir, it's a mental menagerie of media, all these sounds; colours on a pallet just waiting to be painted.