Baker's Branch

  The easiest thing for me to do would be to look out my window (which I am doing right now) and give up. There is snow and ice everywhere, with only the promise of a warmup. That will come, the weatherman just said it, after the next snowstorm. Jeeminy Christmas. It’s all a show. The “party” is over. Winter is over. Winter is like the last guest to leave the party; the one you have to bodily push out the door. March slams the door on winter, every year. Take a look around. If you took out the garbage today, or did any chore at all that put you outside, you heard birds singing in the snow. How odd, and yet how perfectly appropriate. Birds don’t read calendars, they “read” the position of the sun, and they count the hours of daylight. Every duck, goose and swan is headed north by the last week of February, and that is how far away? I can’t give up, now. Neither can you. You do what you want; I’m going fishing. For years, late winter fishing for Dave Hladik and me meant trips to Lake Ten

  Bryon and Ben both use Ben's garage to butcher their deer, as it has more room than Bryon's own, and that's where they store all their butchering equipment; knives, cleavers, and a real old, but nice, Formica countertop their remodeling friend, Ricky Smith, gave them from a job site rather than throw it away. The old countertop is vital. When set up on sawhorses, it provides plenty of working space (you could do two deer at once if you needed to) and its Formica covering allows them to clean it with bleach and water before storing after every butchering. A man at work needs a place to throw his elbows out and get a little blood on the floor if he needs to. Ben's wife, Dori, would be all over them if they did this job in the kitchen (where I do mine now that I think of it). She never opens the door when they're slicing away out there in the garage. She doesn't want to look out there, I suppose. Sometimes they whistle softly to themselves and grin while they wor