Baker's Branch

  I am training yet another dog. At my age. I’m talking about the new German Shepherd pup. Things are coming along “famously”, as they used to say. House trained, pretty much. Heel, in the works. Comes when called, usually. Beginning to sit on command. Not even Pam does that. Kennels, when you throw a treat in there for her. Pam will do that. She likes to fight copperheads, the dog I mean, and has been bitten twice for that, a punishment of its own sort, and I, personally, find it hard to discipline a dog with too much spirit. Pam fights them with brooms. I pretty much leave her alone as well. I’m working on her not wandering from the yard. The dog, I mean. That habit will eventually get her in trouble. All kinds. Most females are not too bad about “wandering”; males are, and get in trouble for it all the time. Ask Roger Bowman about Leo some time, a lab I gave him years ago that established quite a reputation for himself “on the road” without a guitar. The dog, I mean. Anyway, I calle

  God has blessed us and sent some rain upon the earth below. It was a perfect rain, that which wheat farmers in this country call a “million-dollar rain”, soft and saturating, and just in the nick of time to head-out the wheat crop before harvest in June. There are still people in our near desert country depending on acts of God. Good. It's why I live here. Some wheat farmer's kids will now go to college; the family's doctor and vet bills paid, and maybe a new used pickup for the kid still in high school to drive. Mama might get a trip to Neiman-Marcus down in Dallas, with a ticket to see George Strait thrown in, every wheat farmer's wife's dream: something pretty to wear and something pretty to look at. For a change.   God saved Pam and Conrad's garden as well out here on Baker's Branch, the one the grandkids put in back in March. Our spring planting season has been dry, dry, dry, and entering into our fourth year of drought I was worried about the onions,

  Slender Lake, Ontario? Two weeks ago? The fishing was great, and then it got better. I told outfitter Mike Henry (1-807-482-1143, catchfish@pfo.net) before we got there that all Pam and I were interested in was the “down time” away from home to celebrate our fiftieth. Maybe we’d fish, maybe we wouldn’t. For sure we were going to appreciate the peace and quiet, time to ourselves, and the distant skylines gone jagged with spruce.  Sure, you know we were going to fish, but at our own pace and whim. The breakfasts would be long and unhurried; the coffee hot, aromatic, and in a seemingly unending supply from that silver pot over there on the stove where the mouse lives. That, quiet talk, and a good book or two is all that would keep us off the water.  Mike warned me: “You’d better take some leeches or a few crawlers in there with you. Those Slender Lake walleye and smallmouth like meat.”  Look, you’re in Rome you do what the Romans do, right? Not if you’re a hardheaded German. Pam and I h