It is utterly soothing to fly fish for trout. All other considerations or worries drift away and you couldn't keep them close if you wanted. Perhaps it's standing thigh deep in a river with the water passing at the exact but varying speed of life. You easily recognize this mortality and it dissipates into the landscape.

Life is an honor, albeit anonymously delivered.

Fate has never ladled out hardship very evenly, and this frequently trips our often infantile sense of justice.

This infantile sense of order tended to infect my life at large. Up at 5:30 a.m., coffee, oatmeal, perhaps sausage (homemade), and fresh eggs giving one of the yolks to Lola. Listening to NPR and grieving more recently over the absence of Bob Edwards who was the sound of morning as surely as birds. Reading a paragraph or two of Emerson or Loren Eiseley to raise the level of my thinking. Going out to feed the cattle if it was during our six months of bad weather.

Because most writers have totally unrealistic concepts of how publishing works.

When we were children we were errant enough to wish to be birds for the day but there's nothing easier to lose than playfulness.

I thought, frankly, that it would be more pleasant to write a memoir than it was.