We sat on the porch and looked at the flower pot we had moved. In it bloomed small, yellow flowers. Droplets of water hung from the wispy leaves of green that sprouted along their stems. The weather was pleasant, and a light breeze moved lazily from the south. Nothing else, really, was going on. It was the kind of day that disappears among all the other blank calendar squares behind us. It was the kind of day the Old Man would have said should be noticed on purpose.
Summers, through the peak of the Old Man years, were for running trotlines. The chief Old Man turned stout rolls of waxed nylon line into long, smooth instruments of catfish collection. Bait was grown in a purpose-planted grove of catalpa trees or in small ponds once dug for cattle, and we turned it into good eating-sized dressed fish in the freezer at the midnight end of many a long and well-tuned day.
Involved in this operation were a number of 48-quart ice chests. Such coolers come in many sizes, but the 48-quart version was the most practical. One packed lipping full with ice and fish could be lifted and moved from boat to truck bed by a single lifter if it was me, or by two Old Men together if it wasn’t. The coolers were also of a length that made best use of our boat’s floor space. Our coolers weren’t made of steel, they weren’t that old, but they weren’t the disgraceful flimsies affordable coolers have now become. I spent many summer days sitting on the lid of one in a flat-bottomed johnboat, an Old Man burning menthols in the boat’s pair of upholstered seats ahead and behind.
I was blessed to be taken to raise by a cadre of Old Men in whose orbit I lived, but two in particular operated most of the fishing, and I learned to pull my weight along the way. Part of that was being in charge of cleaning the ice chests.
Once a day’s fish dressing operation was complete, I would gather and spray out all the ice chests with a hose, then stand them on one side to drain and dry through the balance of the night. The next morning, I would spray them again, then dress them inside and out with Formula 409, wipe them down with paper towels and set them in the sun. When this was done, I would make sure the trolling motor battery was on charge and take care of any trash.
When the coolers were dry I would snap them closed and stack them ready for their next use. I would have done this at the end of the night when we were through putting away fish but you need sunshine to see what you’re doing, and also sunshine is a good discourager of bacteria. Grit is hard to see in the dark. The sight of a dirty cooler under a carport today gives me a dose of the panic.
With the coolers clean and the trolling motor battery charged and then off the charger, sitting on a piece of plywood on a concrete slab (batteries will bleed charge into concrete, they shouldn’t be left sitting directly on it), we were ready to go again. We usually hit the water three or four days a week, depending on how the days fell, and the balance of the operation was done at home. There were fishing days whose hours crept past midnight, then there were cleaning afternoons amid days when everything else garden- and yard-related happened. This was one of the latter.
This afternoon we had moved a pot of flowers after the yard had been mowed. My Grandmother tended the garden and all was otherwise laid by. The flower pot in question was a cast iron job that had once been used to boil or fry foodstuffs over an open fire. It hung on a chain from a tripod and had to be handled deliberately, else one of the tripod legs would conk the mover in the head while the other two sought mischief of their own. Now we had it where it had been directed to go and it was stable. I looked at the small yellow flowers growing inside.
Memories are intangible things, gently connected to one another, and the most vivid boil down to a single point. A yellow flower on a green stem in a black pot on a straining chain is one of mine.
We never know when our best days are. Usually they’re days we ignored looking forward to days meant to contain something else. Best to notice them all as they go by.
Kevin Tate is a freelance writer. Email [email protected].
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