Welcome to For Everything There is a Season, the follow-up to my first book, Outside in Shorts.
Outside in Shorts commemorated a select handful of life experiences that lived on to become the fabric of traditions – mementos of victories and vestiges of failures. An homage to pleasures and pains, fears and frustrations, trials and triumphs. The ones we taste in a cup of coffee poured before a winter trek in the big woods, and smell in the first, fresh days of spring. Those we hear in the soft chuckle of a summer river and see in the silent sip of trout or the staunch point of a seasoned dog. The ones we wear like a trusty old flannel beside a campfire, where they become tall tales, or even legends, celebrating our common bond with wild places and each other.
This writing aims to do the same. Inside you will find a fresh collection of twenty-three sporting essays gathered over nearly five decades in the outdoors. Each passage within represents a short segment of time from that lengthy measure. Each a small memento plucked from the hourglass sands of seminal experiences.
I hope you’ll enjoy our time together on the metaphorical “porch” – that uniquely American symbol of gathering. The “transitional space between the cocoon of home and the cacophony of the outside world,” as NPR’s Michele Norris so eloquently described it. Where embellishments as thick Mississippi mud and as deep as an old well are not only forgiven with a knowing nod, but as expected as rain on the opener.
