Decisions

Decisions

I am all for self-improvement.  For years I have read articles, watched commercials and listened to ads that have brought ideas about a thousand and one ways to look better, feel better, make more money, plant better gardens, cook healthier meals and find better jobs.  There are self help groups and online sites that tell you how to organize your life, raise your kids, make homemade wine, make your yard fit for ‘fancy smancy’ magazine covers, and tell you what type of music to play for your plants.

   There is barely a need to form an opinion of your own, because you can find the answers to everything on Wikipedia.  Don’t worry about paying attention on those nice weekend drives because there are Groovy GPS Apps quite easily downloadable that tell you exactly where to turn and when to stop. 

 When I am not chasing my own two kids, carrying out orders from my lovely bride, or chasing fish and fowl around Western Wisconsin, I teach ten and eleven year-olds in a small public school.  It’s a fantastic job. Lately there have been drawbacks there as well.  The powers that be are worried about new standards, new curriculum, smarter balances, and common cores.  We are set on mainstreaming those with special needs and talents, toning down those that are too loud, and perking up those that are too quiet.  We have entry exams and exit plans.  We are teaching to the bell curve and trying not to send the parents to the bell tower. Everyone one is overworked, over taxed, underpaid, under appreciated, out manned, and outgunned, even if they are adequately qualified.  

Today’s 4^th graders need to know what the eighth graders of ten years ago did.  The first graders need to do the work that 5^th graders used to do.  My dear Amelia will turn 7 this year. We are looking at colleges to apply for this summer.

So if you are on of those folks all hip on technology and all of the modern conveniences that make us more like druids and less like real folks,   good for you!  But to be perfectly honest I really don’t need that stuff… At least not this fine morning in May.  

    You see, I am proudly yet quietly here in the country I love to call home.  My eyes, ears, and nostrils are all on high alert. I am hunkered down on the bottom of an open coulee next to a scraggly red oak. I’m at the junction of a sprouting first crop alfalfa field, a dry run of sandstone and pea gravel, and a freshly plowed 30 acres that will be chest high corn in 3 months. My mind is at the junction of weighing the sanity of waking at 3:30 a.m. to hunt turkeys.  

 My neighbors for the last hour have been a bobtailed boar coon, 17 red-bellied robins, 2 squawking sand hill cranes in the distance, and three yearling whitetails, nosing into my  decoys cautiously and proudly showing off velvet racks. The busy morning is backlit by the sun, steadily but slowly rising through a bank of  Plum Creek fog.  Drumming grouse, cackling rooster pheasants, and excited crows are providing the rhythm  to thundering four-tom melody, which plays out on the hardwood points above me.

The smell of lilacs, night crawlers and distant campfire smoke mingle with each other and stimulate my easily distracted mind.  I am down to deciding about important things for today.  Shall I take the green Lund out on Lake Pepin and drag floating jigs for walleyes, or hop in my flat bottom and try to snare bluegills and perch from the Tiffany Bottom backwater sloughs. 

After the dew burns off, shall I try to fill bread bags full of morel mushrooms, or try to fill a creel with wild run brook trout?  When it is time to break for lunch, shall I dive into a mushroom & swiss venison burger on the grill, or sizzle up some not totally crisp bacon in a pan and place it with roasted asparagus?  Decisions, decisions, decisions…

Life is a string of them I tell ya.  It is often hard to tell when we make the right ones.  Lots of folks seem to point out when we choose the wrong ones.  Are we keeping up with the Jones’?  Do we post enough pictures of our kids and our DIY projects like our Facebook Friends do?  Has the decision to put out 2 jake decoys and only one hen foiled my otherwise stellar set up? 

 

Decisions…decisions…Wait!  The time has come to set down my pen and steady my 870 on my right knee.  A full strut gobbler is waddling in with a look of bad intentions on his mind.  Now, 60 yards and closing, so you will have to decide how this story ends.

-TGI