It’s Father’s Day and I’m thinking about my dad.  I probably should be spending time with him instead of just thinking about him but… I guess, if I was with him, I probably wouldn’t say these things to him, so maybe it’s better that I’m writing them. We’ve never been too good about saying face to face the things that matter most. We’re getting better but it still isn’t a comfortable thing for us. I do give him hugs and kisses and telling him I love him now. I just decided to start doing that a few years ago, even though it wasn’t something that was normally done in our house growing up. I think he’s gotten used to it. I have. Anyway, these are the things I think of when I think of my dad when I was growing up.

He was and is an outdoors man. Field and Stream and Outdoor Life were the two magazines that we always had available for reading material. He is (at 79 he still does ALL these things) a hunter, a fisherman and a trapper. What does he hunt? Deer, moose, partridge, duck, geese, bear… I’m sure I’m leaving something out. We lived off wild game growing up. Beef was something you ate at a restaurant. Our home became a meat processing plant after deer season ended and part of our job was to grind the hamburger and help package meat for the freezer. You’d think that we’d have antlers mounted and hanging in our house somewhere from a moose or a deer but we didn’t. Plenty of them lying around the yard though. Some of those moose antlers where quite magnificent. Dad must have saved the hide from that biggest bear too because I’ll never forget him scaring the living daylights out of us when he came snorting around the side of our playhouse with it on his back.  Both my brothers learned those outdoor skills from him and were able to start earning their own money from their trap lines at an early age. Beaver and muskrat pelts stretched and drying were a regular part of our winter décor, with an occasional otter thrown in. We have pictures of some of Dad’s record setting beaver pelts trapped in the ponds in our back woods. Only one of his four daughters has followed fully in these footsteps and that’s probably, in part, because she’s the only one still living close to home.