memory
I saw a reference on DW network to hunting season, and got hit by this wave of memory.
I grew up in a rural area in Michigan, with very rural space in an easy drive. Hunting was/is very important there, deeply part of the local culture. My family doesn't hunt, I never was part of it, but it was everywhere around, it was just part of the turn of the seasons. In the late fall, we were more careful when we let the dog out. We moved the horses into the pastures that didn't run up against the woods, we stood at the windows and watched them bolt from the far end of the pasture back up to the barn when a gunshot would spook them.
On the first day of hunting season there was the buck pole, outside the sporting goods store in town that carried hunting supplies. A wooden structure that was there year-round but only used on the first day of hunting season, when hunters brought back bucks they shot that day and hung them on the pole to compare, with a prize for the...best? biggest? I don't actually know what the criteria were. I just know that the store was about two hundred yards from where the road out of town narrowed to go under the railroad tracks, and on the day of the buck pole there were hunters' trucks parked all up and down along the road, and a crowd of people, plus the crowd of protesters, so traffic in and out of town got very tricky. But if you complained, you did it lovingly and laughingly, because it was part of things, it was part of the turn of the seasons, it meant it was autumn and things were moving along the way they should.
I'm crying, typing this. The leaves and the cars and the protesters and the deer strung up on the pole and sitting in the car, waiting, where Main Street becomes Island Lake Road and narrows to go under the bridge.
The things we remember.
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I grew up in a rural area in Michigan, with very rural space in an easy drive. Hunting was/is very important there, deeply part of the local culture. My family doesn't hunt, I never was part of it, but it was everywhere around, it was just part of the turn of the seasons. In the late fall, we were more careful when we let the dog out. We moved the horses into the pastures that didn't run up against the woods, we stood at the windows and watched them bolt from the far end of the pasture back up to the barn when a gunshot would spook them.
On the first day of hunting season there was the buck pole, outside the sporting goods store in town that carried hunting supplies. A wooden structure that was there year-round but only used on the first day of hunting season, when hunters brought back bucks they shot that day and hung them on the pole to compare, with a prize for the...best? biggest? I don't actually know what the criteria were. I just know that the store was about two hundred yards from where the road out of town narrowed to go under the railroad tracks, and on the day of the buck pole there were hunters' trucks parked all up and down along the road, and a crowd of people, plus the crowd of protesters, so traffic in and out of town got very tricky. But if you complained, you did it lovingly and laughingly, because it was part of things, it was part of the turn of the seasons, it meant it was autumn and things were moving along the way they should.
I'm crying, typing this. The leaves and the cars and the protesters and the deer strung up on the pole and sitting in the car, waiting, where Main Street becomes Island Lake Road and narrows to go under the bridge.
The things we remember.
The Dreamwidth copy of this post has
comments. Comment there or here, as you like!