For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.

Ecclesiastes 3:1

My phone buzzed with an incoming text while I built a fire in my fireplace. It was my cousin’s husband, John.

“Did u get much snow?” John texted, in his characteristically straightforward prose.

I responded with a picture out our back french doors.

We parried back and forth a bit, John taunting me with the 50 degree weather he was having in North Carolina and his plans to fish. “Should have some luck with the bass.” he texted.

I replied simply with “bastard!” and added another log to the now growing fire. Then I poured a glass of Langevulin and settled down to the business of rod wrapping snake guides on an 8-weight fly rod I was building.

Outside my little study, the wind howled and the white stuff was flying nearly horizontal. The temperature had been falling by the hour since morning. Snow piled high on the ground and blew in tall drifts. And the more I thought about the winter weather, the more thankful I was for being trapped by it all.

These days it seems that almost no matter where one lives, there’s an open fishing season to be had. On the one hand, it is nice to be able to get out and shake off the rod rust. The abundance of flexible fishing also provides ample opportunity to fish for species that were once closed to a strict calendar date. Trout, back in the day, were off limits from October through March, the opener dependent on the state. Bass season was also closed through winter. But for me anyhow, the true depths of winter provide a fishing respite in a way – a time to step back, work on gear, re-stock flies, build fly rods, make plans, do maintenance and repair, inventory tackle, and set goals for the year ahead. It’s time to do work the work of Stephen Covey’s 7th Habit – “Sharpen the Saw”.

Covey’s 7th Habit is all about the critical importance of self-renewal. The analogy is the saw – one can use a saw until it dulls. Further sawing just increases the workload and the wear until the sawyer is exhausted, the work utterly inefficient and now ineffective. By my way of thinking, time off from fly fishing is a necessary thing, just as rest is important to effectiveness during our hours awake.

Beyond that, there’s something to be said about absence making the heart grow fonder. When I was a boy, I would look forward to Opening Day through what seemed like an endless winter. The anticipation of that magical day just sweetened the experience all the more. It made one savor every aspect of it – waking early to the smell of hot coffee, and eggs and bacon – the chill of the air, the crunch of the remaining snowpack, the taste of the lunch packed, the anticipation as I drifted a worm through the dark waters of a pool, and the tug, that blissful tug of a trout.

As is said, to everything there is a season. Perhaps we should get back to spending more time on sharpening our fly-fishing saw and storing up that wonder and anticipation of another day astream…