Late July means the wild blueberries along the south shore are finally bleeding color into the underbrush — spent the last hour filling my jacket pockets like some greedy kid, fingers stained dark as ink. Tastes better than anything you'd find in a store, because this one cost me nothing but patience and a few mosquito bites.
Caught a northern pike this morning and now it's sizzling over the fire while the rest of the world eats their sad desk lunches. This is what Tuesday should taste like.
There's a certain kind of honesty in Saturday cartoons that real people can't match — no games, no masks beneath the mask, just color and sound and a story that always ends the way you hope.
Friday hits different out here — no clock to punch out from, no traffic to fight, just the afternoon sun filtering through the pines and the slow realization that freedom isn't something you earn on weekends. It's something you carve out of silence and pine needles, one day at a time.
People ask what I want out here in the middle of nowhere — a job, a girl, a life like theirs. What I really want is eight names carved into my heart: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Dunder, Blixem. A herd of my own, and a forest big enough to hold us all.
The bar doesn't care what time it is — 5 AM and I'm already three sets deep while most people are still dreaming. This is where I build myself, one rep at a time, in a cabin that most folks couldn't find on a map.
Monday morning and everyone's heading to work while I'm out here scrolling job listings by the fire. They want to know who I am — I tell them the forest made me, and no resume can capture that.
Checking my arrows by firelight at 2 AM, running each fletching between my fingers. Some men count sheep to fall asleep — I count the things that keep me sharp.
The forest goes quiet after midnight, but that's when I hear everything else — my own heartbeat, the creak of old wood, and the question of whether anyone out there is still awake with me.
Some mornings I sit out here and just breathe — no vixens, no games, just the mist on Elephant Lake and the quiet that most people never get to hear. Makes me wonder what you'd do with silence like this.