Other Writing

The following essay was originally published in the Spring 2026 print volume of Passages North. I’ve included it here because it became a companion piece to my novel. It's about parenting and fly fishing, about being conscious of our body's power and frailty, and it's about giving birth and giving death.

The Pause

In fly fishing, the artificial fly is designed to imitate its model in size, color,

behavior, and stage of life. Tying flies is a bit like galvanism. Pick your genre

and—voilà! Peacock herl for the body. Brown goose feather for the tail. White

goose feather for the wings. Hen for the collar. With thread, tinsel, beads, and

feathers, a stonefly spools to life.

*

Though he’s no Dr. Frankenstein, my husband maintains a focus at his work

table that could be mistaken for madness to those who don’t understand

what he’s doing with all those colorful materials spinning around the vise.

My husband’s father ties flies as well. We find his feathers floating around

the summer cabin.

*

With each ultrasound, more evidence of our sorcery. The blastocyst becomes

the embryo. Neural tube turns into the brain and the spinal cord. Buds spool

into arms and legs. Fingernails appear. Eyelashes. Hair.

*

When casting a fly rod, there is a critical pause between the backward motion

and the forward. The line needs time to straighten out behind you so it

achieves its maximum weight and speed. Arguably, that second of suspension

is when you are most conscious of your movement.

*

My husband’s cast is fluid and assured, though willing to accept error and try

again. He has a keen sense of the currents, and decodes insect hatches as if

they were medieval texts. His father teaches him how to read the water, both

of them endlessly seduced by the secrets of the streams.

*

Almost nineteen hours into labor, the baby is paused between my womb and

the world that awaits. Her rising heart rate concerns the doctor, so the labor

nurse takes my hand and guides it over my belly, between my shaking legs, on

top of our daughter’s head. I feel monstrous and matriarchal. I caress my

baby’s crown: her heart rate slows. It is in this moment of stillness when I am

most aware of my body, most in tune with the mystery that lies ahead.

*

False alarms abound on the stream: rocks, sticks, ripples, easily mistaken

for nips. The moment of truth comes when the fish strikes the fly. It’s a flash,

often seen not felt, and requires pious concentration.

*

God save the queen. Four syllables—preferably said in your head—offer the

optimal delay before you hook the sipping trout, according to my father-inlaw.

Though no fan of monarchy, he believes there’s something regal under

the surface. Contemplating the unknown is far more interesting to him than

catching it. That pause, however brief, invites intense awareness.

*

Three babies lose their baby-ness. Curly locks become straight, blond hair

turns brown, blue eyes go slate, rolls flatten into muscles, forks replace fingers,

Velcro evolves to laces, snaps graduate to buttons. They speak—words! We

are too whiplashed to pause.

*

A dead drift is a fly fishing technique that requires you to negotiate the

relationship between your line and the current. In other words, you want

your fly to be drifting at the same pace as the water so that the fish believes it.

A drag occurs when your fly is working against the current. At some point all

of our bodies will work against the current. This is not a metaphor that will

satisfy the children.

*

It’s mostly a solitary exercise, each fisherman finds his ideal spot on the shore

or in the stream. They talk in between stretches of water, on route from one

section to the next. “Ready to hang ‘em up?” my father-in-law will ask once

the trout have absconded or have been caught and released.

*

They are adolescents now, that phase of life between childhood and

adulthood. I find comfort in the traces of who they were, the glimpses of who

they might become. Fortunately, they’ve gone rogue, spooling into their own

uniqueness, no longer imitating their makers. Still, a mystery.

*

When you mend your fishing line, you fix the drag by flicking your line

upstream in order to reset it. The trick is doing all that without moving the fly

unnaturally. The mend gifts you more time to drift, another chance to catch

that elusive trout. The hardest part is knowing when to do it.

*

A lawyer turned professional golf caddy turned unofficial fly fishing guide, my

father-in-law knows things. He is dependent on the physical world—soothed

by numbers, colors, and patterns—and yet he is drawn to the metaphysical,

unendingly curious about the unproven. Fly fishing spans that liminal space

between the known and the unknown.

*

I am no good at mending, but I do love wading. That first plunge into the

water, the few seconds of anticipation to see if you’re really sealed up, the

steadying of your body, the careful steps down or up river, the moment when

you believe the water has accepted you as her guest. Like adolescence, there

is an in-betweenness about the wade. You are amidst, amongst, trying to be a

big something while pretending you are nothing. The wade is repose.

*

On a good day, it’s possible to fish the life cycle of a fly. Fish with nymphs

at dawn and adults at dusk. You could witness thousands of births, midlives,

and deaths. A committed angler studies the hatches, knows when and

where these aquatic insects will emerge in order to match the artificial fly

with nature’s own.

*

Baked by a Carolina sun, the round mole loses its shape, and turns dark.

Ultraviolet light mutates the cell, and the mole transforms into a melanoma.

Metabolism assists in its survival and it spreads through the bloodstream and

elsewhere to form new tumors. My father-in-law’s unspooling has begun.

*

They say driving with your kids can be the best place to have serious

conversations. There’s nowhere to run; no forced eye contact; no literal finger

pointing, less figurative finger pointing. The stream offers a different kind of

containment for a Q & A. The questions—Is that a rainbow or a brook trout? Is

cancer contagious? What fly should I use? Is there life after death?—

accompanied by the endless soundtrack of trickling water.

*

Reading the water allows you to speculate where the fish might be. Trout like

to rest in the seam—the space between fast moving water and slow—because

it gives them time to replenish the energy expended in the rippled wild.

When a trout sees food, it can maneuver into the fast lane, snatch a snack,

and retreat. If you cast, mend, and choose the right fly, there is no retreat

for that trout.

*

A year into his illness, after grueling treatments and painful surgeries, my

father-in-law calls his son to say goodbye. He is ready to hang ‘em up. A few

minutes later, he calls back, puncturing my husband’s stunned silence, to say

he changed his mind, he’d like some company after all.

*

There is a vibrant pause between dosing, between this life and whatever

awaits him. He gets out of bed and they sit around the old farmhouse table,

the one stained and nicked from all those years of sitting around it. They

recount fishing adventures, recommend their favorite flies, tell jokes, play

cards until it’s too hard to sit up. They embrace extra-long, say I love you,

son, and I love you, too, dad. He returns to his bed, opens his mouth like a

baby bird, and accepts the syringe; he shuts his eyes after one last look at this

life and unspools.