Morning Thanks--Saturday afternoon

I haven’t bought as much bird seed in my entire 64 years as I have in the last two months.  We never, ever had a bird feeder before—now we’ve got three of them. . .well, four if you count the one I tried to make in the shop.  My word, I never had a shop before.  Or tools.

 

We haven’t had TV since we’ve moved in.  For cripes sake, we’re not Amish; we’ve got a Roku and an HTMI cord to connect to the laptop.  But if we want to watch news, we see it a day later, even the conventions.   I’m not sure we’re worse for the wear, we two old folks.

We plan our weeks around necessary trips to town, loading up on tasks as if we can only pack so much on a mule.  We only rarely get out, although we’re still somehow gone a lot.  I’m not sure how that works.

 

We moved into the new/old place too late to have a garden, but I’m already plotting next year.

 

We haven’t yet played a game of dominoes or put together a 1000-piece picture puzzle, but they’re here, waiting for action.  It may well be just a matter of time.

Last Saturday we walked out back and went fishing again—not me, but my grandkids and their friends.  The lunkers the four of them pulled in were fingerlings, but beloved crowd-pleasers.  The kids had so much fun they want to come back.  I spent most of Saturday putting on worms and taking out hooks.

 

And then there’s this—on a whim, I grabbed a couple of ancient bamboo poles from the nails where they hung in a shed out back, put two worms on a pair of hooks huge enough to hang a curtain, and set those poles—ten feet long at least--in the willing hands of a couple of the kids, who thought it was so cool to fish the old-fashioned way.   Amazingly, one of them caught two little bass—on cane poles.

 

I’m not lying.  Check out the picture.

Here’s what I’m thinking.  Retirement is making me feel more and more like I’m the tin-rimmed, balding subject of a Norman Rockwell magazine cover.

Is that good or bad?

All I know is I wouldn’t trade my Saturday for anyone’s.