Invisible Fish

My husband took our two oldest kids (and my dad) fishing yesterday, something which he's waited to do until they were both calm enough that the possibility of one of them accidentally falling into the water out of sheer enthusiasm was MORE remote.

So he drove them up to a long-remembered fishing lake from his childhood, one that was so full of fish that he remembered casting in a line without a lure and pulling up fish after fish, this lush abundance. The kids were set up with their rods and lures and waited patiently all afternoon.. for nothing.

The lake is dead now. Crystal clear all the way to the bottom, my husband said.

It's funny - I think that the town I grew up in and where I now live again is a better town in many, many ways than when I was a child. There aren't angry, violent young drunks on every corner, for one, and there seem to be fewer sexually active children, counter to what the fear-mongerers in the media would like me to think. There are more resources locally, and it feels like a different place - but even knowing that, I still feel this melancholy sense of loss over the things that I took for granted as a child and that my children will never know - a childhood playhouse in the trees with shelves lined with flowery broken dishes, a lake full of fish, friendly childhood dogs that still leap joyfully when remembered.

"They were real troopers," my dad said to me. "But then someone got tired and whiny and childish and so your husband decided it was time to bring me home."

My children, however, were contented and cheerful when they got home. "Hey mom!" yelled The Girl, waving her empty hands. "I'm in charge of carrying all of our fish!"

The Boy was exhausted and bug-bitten and happy, wearily eating supper and then going to bed very early, telling me only that he'd had such a nice day. My husband's story, later on, was more complicated in the way that adult stories become, full of once-public roads now privately owned and locked, crown lands now lost to weekend residents, lakes that were once full of fish and are now deadly calm - changes that have happened and not for the better. But my children were simply happy.

It will become, I suspect, a favorite childhood memory of their unfathomable adult years, something that they will carry with them and secretly mourn that they cannot give to their own children, an ephemeral and gone golden day. All they'll be able to give their unimaginable children are long-winded stories that they'll barely listen to as they strain to look out the car windows at a landscape that is subtly no longer their own.

Original Canada Moms Blog Post.