Reflections for a Rainy Day

We finally got some rain in central Florida. It’s been bone dry here for the last month or more. The rain didn’t last long, just enough to cool things down and bring a quiet, comfortable feel to the day. Watching raindrops fall from the branches of the camphor tree in the backyard is a simple yet pleasant self-quarantining exercise for me on a day like today.

It’s the kind of day to do some simple things. Holding a favorite shotgun on my lap, admiring the engraving, the finely-checkered grooves scored into the walnut fore-end and stock, inhaling familiar, comfortable smells of gunpowder and Hoppe’s No. 9, I’m ushered by these into a hundred fields, and as many woods on innumerable hunts across immeasurable spans of time.

The rice paddies of Japan where green-headed Kigis struggled to gain airspeed and succumb to a shot string of hand-loaded sixes. The redwood-laced hardwoods of Aomori, where the coppery Yamadori, magnificent tail feathers a yard in length, elude the smoothbore’s tardy swing, dodging through the standing timber like the grouse of my Appalachian youth.

A homeward bound woody at dusk, wings whistling in the crisp fall air, falling in flight to a practiced swing and the factory-load of number fours, congregated tightly by the modified choke. The beautifully-feathered drake gathered hastily from Indian Creek’s waters, providing dinner and a treasured mount that still causes wonder these forty years later.

All things a gun grabber will never understand.

What triggers your thoughts days like this?