Nursing a cold and battling the shack nasties, I was couch-bound and reading a book about fly fishing in the northwest. It stirred up a concoction of memories of my trip to British Columbia last spring and fly fishing in its mountains. As good an elixir to lessen the ague of a head cold as any I had taken. Outside there were snow devils whirling across the yard; fresh powder of the overnight snowfall spiraling upward to reveal the glitter of ice crystals embedded upon the hard crust. The wind chill was calculated at negative fifteen degrees Fahrenheit; another frigid day in a long spell of arctic conditions preceded by a cycle of rain, sleet and ice. I was beginning to seriously ponder the onset of spring.
Broken clouds raced across the sky, sporadically revealing its blueness and letting the sun pour through the window where I sat propped to catch the warmth on my shoulders. It felt as good as that high mountain sun in the Canadian Rockies felt after fishing in the rain, when the roiling clouds and thunder had left in their wake an impossibly brilliant rainbow arching across the full extent of the blue sky. Author Thomas McGuane once wrote, “For such things are we placed upon this careening mudball.” Starved of sunshine here in the northeast for much of the winter, even a little dose of it through the panes can make you almost giddy.
Winter in its extremes can be an impediment to giddiness unless it’s maintained artificially by food or strong drink. I find my equilibrium by staying as active as I can in the outdoors, hiking and cross country skiing. I’ll avoid being trite by not recounting the ways in which winter ski trails can lead to euphoria. This day though, I’m stuck indoors with a good book and day dreaming: of mountains in bloom, clear lakes and rivers, wild trout rising to mayflies, a fly rod rigged and in hand as the morning sun cracks the dawn over the water and…well, there you go, it’s been said before. In a few weeks will come the vernal equinox and the winged harbingers of spring: the geese and the robins and the red-winged blackbirds, many of which will nest along familiar watercourses. There the trout will begin to shake off their sluggishness as the waters warm and the mayflies will begin their flights of fancy. Still, as one with a case of the doldrums, it seems like a long ways off.
And then as if I had wished for them out loud, there they were, not literally in front of my nose, but waiting to be discovered behind my back, etched upon the window pane by Jack Frost himself: a flight of mayflies as if recently hatched from the surface of the stream. No less exquisite made of ice crystals as they are organically and animated in spring time, and no less instilling in me that elated feeling when it’s time to cast that first fly. I wonder, What if I had been thinking of something other than fly fishing? Would the haphazard appearance of those frosted designs have resembled something else? Certainly philosophers and mathematicians have pondered theories of parallels and counterparts and random happenstance, submitting explanations for things such as “getting what you wish for.” Not to mention the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (my test being not ink blots but frost formations). No matter. I felt better for a while in seeing them, never mind the science.
Broken clouds raced across the sky, sporadically revealing its blueness and letting the sun pour through the window where I sat propped to catch the warmth on my shoulders. It felt as good as that high mountain sun in the Canadian Rockies felt after fishing in the rain, when the roiling clouds and thunder had left in their wake an impossibly brilliant rainbow arching across the full extent of the blue sky. Author Thomas McGuane once wrote, “For such things are we placed upon this careening mudball.” Starved of sunshine here in the northeast for much of the winter, even a little dose of it through the panes can make you almost giddy.
Winter in its extremes can be an impediment to giddiness unless it’s maintained artificially by food or strong drink. I find my equilibrium by staying as active as I can in the outdoors, hiking and cross country skiing. I’ll avoid being trite by not recounting the ways in which winter ski trails can lead to euphoria. This day though, I’m stuck indoors with a good book and day dreaming: of mountains in bloom, clear lakes and rivers, wild trout rising to mayflies, a fly rod rigged and in hand as the morning sun cracks the dawn over the water and…well, there you go, it’s been said before. In a few weeks will come the vernal equinox and the winged harbingers of spring: the geese and the robins and the red-winged blackbirds, many of which will nest along familiar watercourses. There the trout will begin to shake off their sluggishness as the waters warm and the mayflies will begin their flights of fancy. Still, as one with a case of the doldrums, it seems like a long ways off.
And then as if I had wished for them out loud, there they were, not literally in front of my nose, but waiting to be discovered behind my back, etched upon the window pane by Jack Frost himself: a flight of mayflies as if recently hatched from the surface of the stream. No less exquisite made of ice crystals as they are organically and animated in spring time, and no less instilling in me that elated feeling when it’s time to cast that first fly. I wonder, What if I had been thinking of something other than fly fishing? Would the haphazard appearance of those frosted designs have resembled something else? Certainly philosophers and mathematicians have pondered theories of parallels and counterparts and random happenstance, submitting explanations for things such as “getting what you wish for.” Not to mention the psychiatrist Hermann Rorschach (my test being not ink blots but frost formations). No matter. I felt better for a while in seeing them, never mind the science. 
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