At the Mention of Cory’s Name

Although I like to think I’m a well-rounded person, I often feel that the parts of my life are compartmentalized. It’s not often enough when my thinking life meets my personal life, when the ideas I care the most about actually touch moments in my life.

However, that happened this weekend while visiting my stepdaughter, her husband, and their new baby. While there I happened to mention to Cory, an avid fishermen, that I had been writing about Richard Hugo’s love of fishing. I mentioned that I had thought of putting in a Hugo poem about steelhead fishing that reminded me of Cory’s devotion of fishing, but I doubted that he was reading my weblog.

Cory went to the website and read the blogs I had written, and we spent a good part of Sunday talking about fishing and our common environmental beliefs. Cory’s trying to preserve a small, but beautiful plot of land on the Puget Sound.

Left alone, I spent a few minutes taking photographs of the fishing mementos that decorate their beautiful house that faces the Puget Sound, fishing mementos that reminded me once again just how important fishing is to the Northwest’s image of itself. Here’s a collage of those mementoes: