Reeling in the Years

It’s easy for me to tell when it’s winter, but this has nothing to do with the weather. It was sunny and mild today. The weekend’s skiff of snow is a faded memory. So, it’s not the weather that reminds me it’s winter as weather has become an unreliable tool for determining seasons. Instead, I know it’s winter because I spent half the afternoon online, shopping for fly reels. I’m more obsessive about this bit of gear than most fly fishers. Those of us of a certain age know that a fly reel was once considered little more than a line-storage device. In those bygone days, we fought fish by...