Today I turn 66 years of age. An age that I once thought of as old, but now of course view in an entirely different light.

A few months ago, thinking about my brother Paul being gone and how when I think of him I always think about fly fishing, I looked at Sue and asked, “How come I quit fly fishing?” And just like that, I dusted off my fly rod and started making plans.

In the past two weeks, I’ve been out a couple of times now. And today Sue and I leave for a long weekend in Wisconsin where I hope to fish a few more times.

The first time I ever fly fished, I was probably 15 or 16. I was fishing on the Missouri River just below a little dam outside of Toston, Montana—a town just a few miles upriver from my hometown of Townsend. Anyway, there was a guy fly fishing there and we got talking and he let me use one of his rods and gave me some basic lessons. He caught a fair number of trout. I lost two. But I was intrigued.

It took a while before I tried it again, but when I did, I was definitely hooked.

Like my habit of rereading favorite novels, fly fishing just seems like the right thing to be doing at this point in my life.