My family has spent the summer fishing. We have a pond out behind our county home with a paddle boat that makes drifting along with a rod and reel quite comfortable. Early this summer I captained the boat and took our 6 year old son, Cabell, and two of his buddies on a fishing excursion. It wasn’t long before Collier got a bite and began to reel in a fish big enough to make a candy cane out of his rod. When the fish got to the edge of the boat Collier and I both leaned over to the water while I pulled up on the fishing line. We just saw the whites of his fish eyes when his weight pulled him off the hook. As the fish swam away Collier asked, “Do you think he saw me?”
“I’m afraid he did,” I replied. “I think eventually that fish will put two and two together and figure out that we are the perpetrators of that purple jelly worm trick. I doubt we’ll catch him again today, anyway.”
Based on subsequent fishing experience there are plenty of fish in our pond who will still succumb to the lure. Most Saturday afternoons my son, daughter, husband and father-in-law will paddle and fish for several hours and return to shore with big fish stories. Cabell almost caught Methuselah, the biggest of all pond fish, but it got away. He fishes almost exclusively in the cattail corner of the pond that he calls bass cove. He refuses to fish with a float on his line because he is convinced that the fish look at the worm and then won’t bite if they can see the bottom side of the red bobber floating on the surface of the water.
Frank joined the fishing group late one Saturday, but promptly pulled in a 10 inch bass estimated to weigh 3 pounds. This fish like all others caught in our pond got a pat on the gills and a gentle return to the water. One rainy day the fishermen ran out to the pond edge during 20 minutes of relative sunshine and Emma reeled in a foot long bass that was reported to weigh close to 4 pounds.
While the rest of my family has been dangling hooks I’ve been working in the garden tending my tomatoes. This time of the summer I’m on a mission to find and eliminate all tomato horn worms. I track them down from tomato plant branches where they’ve munched off all the leaves and left nubbins of green tomatoes.
Last night as we read in bed Frank asked me how the tomatoes were doing. “I completely forgot to tell you,” I exclaimed, “I found a huge tomato horn worm yesterday. He was as long as from the tip of my thumb to the top of my wrist. He was fatter than my thumb, too.”
“Hmm,” Frank mumbled turning back to his reading unimpressed.
“Actually,” I went on, “It was as big as my fist. I have NEVER seen a tomato horn worm so big.”
Frank looked up from his book a little more intrigued by the fist-sized description. “So, did you feed it to the chickens?” He asked.
“On, no,” I explained. “This worm would have caused a chicken to choke and keel over. It was all green and plumpy soft. Why, it may even have been bigger than a chicken.”
“Did you keep him?” Frank asked.
“No,” I confessed. “I threw him back over the garden wall. You know how I hate to clean ‘em. Those worm scales and insides make such a mess.”
