The Trout

A long, long time ago, the year I first met her, my friends labelled her as contentious. It is as accurate today as it was back then. Fortunately, the mood swings and she, long since my wife and the mother of our child, is not locked in the same mode all of the time. She can be warm and loving and receptive, but more often these feelings seem directed towards and reserved for our daughter than myself. When she is irasible and confrontational, I call her Trout because I discern a slight jutting of the chin coupled with a pugnacious attitude that is prefereably avoided. I liken it to the frozen moment just before a fish lunges for a fly. If we are face to face, I know that epithets are forthcoming, sometimes even utensils, like the fork she once planted between my eyes. If we are on the phone and I sense the Trout's surfacing, the phone is sure to click, disconnected. We have lots of hang-up calls, more these days it seems. It seems as though Trout has risen to the bait many times this fall. Is it that it is a time of high tension and anxiety? Or is it a period when she is too much on her own, a time when I pick up the telephone, all I must do is listen? She monologues, sometimes pretending it is the clumnsiness of the cell phone, though mostly she is just shouting her point at unreceptive ears. The Trout has been most righteous of late, often stirred up, angry, whether it is the presidential campaign or the election results themselves, or the squirrel in the attic of our house. I tease her about the rodent that is almost never evident when I come home with the dogs. In fact, I think the Trout has jumped on land and may now need a platform, some kind of a soapbox to stand on and wage war upon its captive audience of husband and daughter. Trout at Speaker's Corner! Command Performance! Perhaps the Trout will go to deeper waters for the winter. We do not like its churlishness; we do not like its bite.