The day I've been waiting for

We were sitting at the kitchen table shelling peanuts and enjoying the salty taste, sipping on a “London Porter,” and reviewing the day’s successes after a pleasant afternoon of ice fishing when he said, “the next time we go ice fishing I think we should go for trout.”

My heart leapt. I tried to contain my inner childlike glee because I’d been hoping he’d say that for weeks now.

I smiled big, my head bobbed back and forth in agreement as I chomped on a mouthful of peanuts and swallowed hard so I could bounce back with, “That would be great. I’m game,” while trying not to give away my absolute enthusiasm at the prospect of landing a fighting machine, cousin to a salmon.

I would take ten-fold passage over to the adventure.

Immediately I pictured myself landing a record weight prize that would take me an hour to reel in. I would use every muscle I had to pull it through the ice hole. Maybe I’d have to cut a bigger hole just to get it out. The trout would be so big I wouldn’t be able to pick it up. Photographs of my catch would appear in newspapers across Northwestern Ontario and Minnesota. My name would become a link in “Wikipedia” references to lake trout.

“But there’s only one catch,” added the smooth talking outdoorsman. I brushed off the cautionary tale I heard in his voice as he stroked his beard in contemplation.

I was too busy thinking about what kind of jig I was going to use to land that rod-snatching bulldog cheetah of freshwater that www.in-fisherman.com had convinced me was the ultimate challenge for this new-born ice fisherwoman.

“The one catch is that we have to snowshoe two miles in to get to the lake I want to take you to,” he said, giving me that anticipatory raise of eyebrow and a smile I knew all too well.

I coughed up the peanut I inhaled in the realization of the price I was going to have to pay to get my trout. Suddenly I wished I hadn’t written that column about the Snowshoe Olympics and my big, fat ego. I had to fight back my “Yosemite Sam” impersonation that was surfacing as fast as that hooked fish I’d been dreaming about.

“Sure,” I replied. “I can do that,” I sputtered, switching gears in my head to rent workout videos so I could get in shape for the day when I would strap on beavertails and channel Dora Keen, Marion Randall Parsons, and Mary Jobe, my three pioneering outdoorswomen heroines, so that I could walk the walk.

A new website I’ve been put on to is www.thelostartofmanliness. I’m at the other end of the spectrum from manly and yet it’s a really great read. I, too, can relate to the story within the story that speaks to memories of youth and gym class.

I dreaded gym class all the time. I loved exercise but I didn’t like gym suits and I didn’t like fitness tests because I could never run as fast as Janelle or jump as high as Janelle. She was the bomb. She got the gold. I got the “below bronze, participatory badge” for effort.  Always.

But I will snowshoe the two miles. I will do whatever it takes to get to that lean, mean fighting machine that is swimming in those deep waters out there in a northern lake and has no idea who’s coming for him.

I win.

Little Miss discovers blue-sky thinking

“I merely took the energy it takes to pout, and wrote some blues.” The late great Duke Ellington had the right idea.

Sadly, I can pout with the best of them, but I cannot read, write, nor play a lick of music. 

When I pout, all my energy goes into finding a piece of chocolate I stashed in the cupboard, which then leads to the blues because I always eat more of it than I should. 

Hmm, not exactly the kind of productive energy transference Mr. Ellington was talking about.

“I’d stop eating chocolate but I’m no quitter.” Now that’s more like me.

I’m grasping at straws here, wrapped in layers of wool sweaters and a side dish of feeling sorry for myself as another cold night passes through the walls of this old house and into my bones.

I keep thinking of what it would be like to do what my friend Don and so many others do this time of year—drive south until the butter melts.

Someday I will. I’m going to put a pound of butter on a plate in the passenger seat and see how far I have to go before it withers. Some day my time will come when I can blow the cold a goodbye holiday kiss.

But for now what I can do, what I do know how to do is take a really, really hot shower. Lobster hot. It is my escape pod in the deep freeze of winter, my weapon against the blues that chocolate cannot fix.

I’m a hot shower aficionado. In fact if lobster hot showers were an Olympic sport I’d win a gold medal for Canada, even at 53 years old. I’d be an icon of the ages, the oldest woman in history to land a gold medal at the Olympic games. That would be me.

Even “Sochi 2014” champions could not ski, speed skate, nor snowboard their way to the center podium against my lobster hot showers and me.

I win.

The Winter Olympics always get me fired up. I ingested the gold medal Canadians Alexandre Bilodeau, Charles Hamelin, and the Dufour-Lapointe sisters from their Sochi performances and I then I braved the cold weather and set off on my solo quest, chest puffed out, my Olympic-sized ego in tow as I tore down to the frozen creek bed in thigh-deep drifts of unstirred snow, dreaming of my very own Snowshoe Olympics.

And then I got stuck about half way to the starting line. Stuck like cement shoe stuck.

Suddenly I lay prone in the snow after throwing myself backwards in a “flip-out” fit mixed with hopes of wedging free.

I was stuck there long enough that my desire for Olympic greatness passed in favor of cloud spotting and a membership in Gavin Pretor-Pinney’s “Cloud Appreciation Society” (look it up, yes, it’s real.)

The sun was shining, the sky was azure blue, and I saw a cloud that looked like my old dog, “Dot.”

“Clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul.”

No Olympic snowshoe race could beat that. I still win.