Thursday, June 14, 2018

Winds of Despair

This has to be short if I'm gonna get today's entry posted before midnight....

Drove back to the north country today....northern Minnesota that is.  Got up and hit the road early, hoping to use the sunny afternoon to spray some food plots with herbicide.  Got here to discover plenty of sunshine, but also plenty of wind.  Ugh, wind - the worst weather possible.

Can't spray when it's windy.  Tough to do anything when it's windy.  My parents, my sister and family, and I went fishing tonight and got blown all over the lake.  And rained on.  And thundered at. But mostly dealt with the wind.  Tough to cast in, tough to control the boat in, just overall tough to fish in.  Now, because all I do is put people on fish we did catch a nice group of crappies and one nice walleye....but the wind made it stressful.  So with no field work done and a fishing trip nearly ruined it's easy to look at this day of summertime as being destroyed by the wind.  Except for one thing....

We flew kites this afternoon.  I haven't flown a kite for.....decades, maybe?  My nephews had a couple of big, inflatable kites that were kind of fun to watch, but when my mom mentioned the possibility of an old kite being in the porch I had to go look.  She was wrong - there were three kites!  Pretty soon the skies above the north pasture were filled with kites.  At one point a lone duck came flying through from the west and got noticeably confused by the UFOs in its flight path.

I'd forgotten what it was like to fly a kite - simple yet a little complicated.  Dull while being somewhat intriguing.  Relaxing.  To stand and watch a piece of plastic wrapped around some sticks hover in the sky doesn't sound appealing on the surface.  But it was a lot of fun.  I'm not ashamed to admit that I was still flying a kite long after the kids had moved on to other activities....

The wind still howls as the clock pushes towards midnight.  I have hopes of waking to calmer weather tomorrow so I can fish without the stress of boat control.  I can't stand windy days....but for an hour this afternoon the wind became an ally in a childhood activity that even an old grump can find fun.

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