A Line of Thought?

I am at the tea shop half-listening to conversations of teenagers at neighboring tables who are enjoying their time away from school. Almost completely unnoticed by the jovial crowd of young people, I, dressed in a fading yellow windbreaker, old blue jeans, and wearing an old fishing ball cap covering my sparse grayed hair, peer through my scratched, round-rimmed glasses about the room and at my keyboard and consider my words before writing. I recall last month's trip to New Zealand and feel the urge to express some memories, but, like little bubbles on a wandering foam line at the outer edge of an eddy, these once valuable recollections blur, fade, and slip into an indistinct swirling center, into an opaque world of minute particles existing below the surface. This is water where the drowned thoughts of past success and joy, of regret and sadness, now "swim with the fishes". The time has come again for me to trust in the future and let my imagination and curiosity keep me afloat. As I grow older though, even with experience, the river looks ever harder to wade for the tenacious fisherman. The flow of the downstream current appears to become roily and more mysterious in its prophetic westward flow to the mouth. My joints and vision, like the rest of my body aren't what they used to be. I am another crooked, brittle branch hanging over the river's shore. Nonetheless it is the day to re-bait, while I still can, find a new fly to match the ever-waning season's hatch and reach back with renewed effort to cast again into the magnificent challenge of life.