Trout season recently opened in Newfoundland. I always think of my Pop. When I was little, up at his cabin on witless bay line, he would take me out in his little aluminum boat early in the morning. Woven basket slung around his shoulder, he fussed anxiously over my life jacket. We would putt along to the far end of the pond, where reeds and lily pads bobbed in the fragile space between the fog and the water's surface.

He was big and tall and loud and boisterous, but he was also a hunter, trapper, fisher and fixer. It's easy to revere him in memory, especially in a singular memory. He loved teaching his daughters about the woods and the water. Never leave your trapline unchecked for the night. The tension between the violence of killing and the compassionate rituals of his practice echo for me.

I remember the jolt of excitement and horror when the line went taught. The quiet of the morning broken by his encouraging whispers. The reverberation through the aluminum boat as he bashed the small fish against it's side. The trickle of blood on his palm as he laid the silvery stillness in the basket.

This memory is my memory of him. Combing through old poetry, I realized that I've written about it in a few ways, a few times.

The “TROUT FISHING, EARLY MORNING”, I wrote during a poetry course with Mary Dalton during my MA in English at MUN.

The other, “Elegy for a Trout Pond”, I don’t know when I wrote it. But it’s interesting looking back to see very different affective contours to the same memory and the way the later references and reworks the former.

He suffered with dementia before passing years ago. I wrote a song called “Memory” that captures the strangeness, the gift, and the cruelness of watching someone you love forget while knowing that memory lives on in our bodies, in our kinship ties, in the cosmos, in photos and poems and recipes and traplines and the bellies of trout. We started recording that song years (!!) ago now, but finding new shapes for making things has mostly been about softening my relationship to time, embracing the wheel rather than the line, the spiral over arrival.

One of the ways I feel that spiral is in the echoes of cultural memories across generations and moments in my life. The way that childhood memory intersects with the spirit of my pop, recurring in so many of my present-day relationships and memories. Like these beautiful trout that Chris caught, their colour, their spots, their small fins pressed into the aluminum of the sink.

And here’s a picture of myself and Chris in our old home in Holyrood, taken by our dear friend Matt Horseman, with Pop’s trouting basket behind us.