It’s easy for me to tell when it’s winter, but this has nothing to do with the weather. It was sunny and mild today. The weekend’s skiff of snow is a faded memory. So, it’s not the weather that reminds me it’s winter as weather has become an unreliable tool for determining seasons. Instead, I know it’s winter because I spent half the afternoon online, shopping for fly reels. I’m more obsessive about this bit of gear than most fly fishers. Those of us of a certain age know that a fly reel was once considered little more than a line-storage device. In those bygone days, we fought fish by...
