PICAYUNE —
It depends to a large extent on who you’re talking to, but the term “First Day,” or “Opening Day” doesn’t mean when our forebears were back in the Garden of Eden, eating peaches. If you mention that in late summer or early fall, everyone knows with certainty that you are referring to the Opening Day of dove season. A month later, there’s a choice: might be squirrel, rabbit, or bow season.
Before you get up on your dewclaws, now, I do not have a pamphlet in front of me with the game laws and seasons on it. Squirrel season has just traditionally opened around the first of October, deer bow season about then, too, and we always figured the beagles were ready to run rabbits when it had frosted a couple of times to make the “wolves” (botfly larvae) drop off the bunnies.
Along comes Thanksgiving, marking the opening of deer gun season in most places, as well as the bird season, or quail, as it is listed. Soon duck season arrives (I’m not sure that they even have a closed season on geese anymore) and a real sportsman is faced with the possibilities of taking the decoys and shotguns along with the .30-06 and drag strap. God planned it all thataway.
The cold weather hit just right around here for Opening Day. It was a clear but windless dawn, the frost crisping up the grass and leaves in its hoar-white grasp in the pre-dawn darkness. In my experience, that would be good: it always has seemed that the deer don’t move quite as early on such a day, but they do get really active once the sun bumps over the horizon, when you are in your stand. Of course, that white frost on the metal rungs will betray you if you aren’t careful in your rubber-bottomed boots.
Settled in, with a cup of Slung Coffee from the camo thermos hanging from the nail on the tree beside the stand, and you idly wonder once again if deer can smell coffee, and if it doesn’t smell as good to them as it does to you! Movement to the right in the dry grass along the trail — a couple of coyotes slipping back to sleep off their night’s hunting. Shortly there’s a gray-spotted blur behind a briar patch, which turns out to be a bobcat slinking through the brush — beautiful!
Brown — there’s a brown form out there just behind a buckbrush, and it moved. Are those antlers glinting in the sun, or a bare branch? Bare branch, but it’s a doe who tiptoes into the edge of a clearing, then she pulls the old “Look back behind me” trick just as I’ve decided that maybe she’s big enough for the freezer. It’s amazing that the half-full cup has reached safety at the side of the board forming the top of the stand, without me realizing I was setting it down. The scope reveals no antlers behind the lying doe, but now she’s fed into a plum thicket that will never reveal a clear shot — it worked again!
The cup replenished from the steaming thermos soundlessly and with hardly any detectable movement, I lean back against the sycamore just as the rays of the sun begin to warm my outside while the coffee warms the inside.
Okay, that would be the start of a perfect Opening Day, if you can imagine what I just imagined.
But it would be many times more perfect if I really was there.
See, I picked up an exotic little bug a few months ago, which took a while to convince me to seek professional medical treatment (I ain’t bad about running to the doc for a hangnail), then a little while longer for the aforesaid professional medicos to figure out and treat, then a little while longer to actually get that little sucker defeated and in remission (it had un-remissed after 30-plus years) then a little while longer to identify another exotic infection from the same era that makes the victim’s red blood cells pass off before they’re half grown, resulting in a diagnosis of severe anemia right before a woman’s voice proclaims, “Don’t you even THINK about climbing up in a deer stand, even in your own back yard!”
Have you too reached the automatic “Yessum” stage? Sure was a pretty day.
Opinion
It was a perfect Opening Day
- Opinion
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Not your mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
I haven’t seen the Ladies’ Home Journal in about a million years, except maybe in the dentist’s office when I was trying to avoid a television permanently set on Fox News.
Somebody’s grandchild was selling magazines for a school project, and Ladies’ Home Journal was the only one on the list I recognized. Now it comes to the house.
Let’s just say: It’s not my mother’s Ladies’ Home Journal. This month, right behind a feature called “A Country of People Who Never Stop Eating” is one called “Nice Girls Do Get Tattoos.” -
Health care market needs oversight
By Gene Lyons/Syndicated columnist
Sometimes the best journalism explains what’s right under our noses. In Steven Brill’s exhaustive Time magazine cover article, “Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us,” it’s the staggeringly expensive, grotesquely inefficient and inhumane way Americans pay for medical care.
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VA’s appalling failures not recent
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While recent national press attention to ongoing problems at Mississippi’s G.V. (Sonny) Montgomery Veterans Administration Medical Center in Jackson is welcome and needed, the failures of the overall VA service apparatus in Mississippi are not recent problems.
In short, former U.S. Rep. Sonny Montgomery — Mississippi’s “Mr. Veteran” and author of the modern G.I. Bill that bears his name — must be spinning in his grave. There have been significant failures and poor service to veterans documented by state and local media since 2008. -
Dolley Madison politically savvy
By Cokie and Steven V. Roberts/Syndicated columnists
When Dolley Payne Madison became first lady in 1809, she instituted Wednesday evening gatherings at the White House where political rivals could meet and talk. They were called “squeezes” because so many people showed up and crowded the room. As Cokie wrote in her book “Ladies of Liberty": “All were welcome as long as they were appropriately dressed. And all went — skipping a Wednesday night might mean missing a vital piece of political information or being left out of a crucial deal.”
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Mississippi isn’t immune from national college tuition trends
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
Higher education in Mississippi has not been immune from national trends cited in a recent Center on Budget and Policy Priorities report which concludes that over the last five years, the global economic downturn and a “no new taxes” political climate have increasingly shifted the burden of higher education finance to students and parents at a time when enrollment is increasing and the percentage of state support is decreasing. -
Right to vote not ‘racial entitlement
By Donna Brazile/Syndicated columnist
The Supreme Court heard oral arguments in the case of Shelby County v. Holder — a challenge to the Voting Rights Act of 1965, specifically Section 5, which requires states and localities with a history of voting discrimination against racial and language minorities to get “pre-approved” by the federal government before changing how elections are conducted or voters are registered. -
1st day of spring brings memories
By Wyatt Emmerich/Southside Sun
The first day of spring! My favorite month, April, is just around the corner. Now we just need one big gullywasher to get rid of the pine pollen.
Normally, spring gives me a strong sense of rebirth and renewal, but this spring I seem surrounded by moments crystallizing the passage of time.
It was a year ago, I walked up the porch to my mother’s home to box up her possessions following her funeral. -
Soaking up in tiger paw-shaped hot tub
By Rheta Grimsely Johnson/Syndicated columnist
No springtime ritual was better at Auburn than sitting on hard rocks at a nearby state park to let cold water rush over your feet. You wore cut-off blue jeans and Dr. Scholl’s sandals, the unofficial uniform for coeds in the 1970s, and when you left, you felt ready to tackle tests, term papers and blind dates.
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Medicaid or not, costs will be paid
By Sid Salter/Syndicated columnist
While the battle continues between state Republicans and other fiscal conservatives intent on focusing on the long-terms costs of Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act and Democrats, health care advocates and state hospitals intent on focusing on the short-term benefits, the fact remains that one way or another, the costs of providing health care for the poor, the blind, the aged and the disabled will be paid by the taxpayers one way or another.
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Multiculturalism is not rational
By Thomas Sowell/Syndicated columnist
Among the many irrational ideas about racial and ethnic groups that have polarized societies over the centuries and around the world, few have been more irrational and counterproductive than the current dogmas of multiculturalism.
Intellectuals who imagine that they are helping racial or ethnic groups that lag behind by redefining their lags out of existence with multicultural rhetoric are in fact leading them into a blind alley. - More Opinion Headlines
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