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Cold, wet weather surrounded us this past weekend. While I am no stranger to dropping temperatures and increasing rainfall, I tend to enjoy them from a warm spot when ducks and deer are out of season. 

From a comfortable chair in a rental cabin outside of Martinsville, VA, I decided that I would trade outdoor activities to reminisce about our adventures up there from years past.

Basset Furniture still has stores across the country. At one time, the furniture was made in a town of the same name. My father-in-law, Jim, was raised there, and it was a place where industry and wilderness were practically side by side. The Smith River coursed through the center of the town surrounded by factories and mill houses, and just upstream of the town is an undeveloped section of river teeming with trout. 

While I watched the small streams of water flow down the hill through the window, I listened to Jim tell stories of growing up on the Smith: “Openers” where getting a limit of trout was easy, uncles long gone who had a magic touch with a spinning rod, and catching a record book Brown trout. A cousin mentioned the prospect of stocking some native trout to stock the small streams near the old homeplace a dozen miles to the west. That was all my imagination needed to take me from the Smith River to that small creek.

The Homeplace has been in and out of the family since the War Between the States. Lying in the middle of a beautiful, wooded bowl, two houses stand along a gravel drive, bisecting a pasture. This piece of property’s historical value was not only based on the wooded ridges but the cool springs that bubbled up from the bedrock. 

If it was drier outside, we would have hiked to these cool springs and tried to find remnants of entrepreneurs who also used the springs during prohibition. The dogs and kids always love splashing in the creek. A two-foot-wide pipe leads the creek under the gravel drive. The culvert serves as an agility course for a brave Labrador Retriever named Moose. He loves disappearing back and forth under the road, getting muddier with each pass.

The thought of Southern Appalachian Brook Trout, the east coast’s only native trout, being nourished by that small cold spring made me thankful for the rain outside. While the rain dashed Moose’s dreams of culvert running, this damp weather fills the groundwater tanks with hope.

I don’t do stationary well. Some days call for it, though. This weekend, while I had planned on wetting a line or hiking around the old homeplace, I got to do the next best thing: Remember the times of better weather. The walk down memory lane gave me a nice break, so I will be ready, once the rain stops and the temperature rises, to make some more memories for a rainy day.