Gettin’ Fishy

Back when I was a boy, you didn’t go spend an afternoon at the farm pond and come home empty-handed, talking about the crappie you’d caught. Catch and release was not an option when the crappie switch got flipped to On. Had “empty-handed” happened, there would have been a looming sense of disappointment starting, no doubt, with my mother.

Crappie fillets were a delicacy in our household, elevated almost to the same height as apple pie.

Any time my brothers and I were fishing and one of us landed a crappie, he’d put it on the stringer and fish the rest of the day, hoping that switch I mentioned earlier would come on and we’d get fishy. If we didn’t fill the stringer with a skillet-full of fish, of course, we’d let the lone crappie back into the pond, but the intention was never to let it go.

Heck, crappie were the main reason for always carrying along a stringer in