prefer to not get old. Old people forget things. This would be annoying.
I do, on rare occasions forget minor things, such as where I parked my truck or when my wife has a birthday.
Such things are easily remedied. The key on the truck has a panic button. The lost truck beeps incessantly until found. The noise is annoying but effective.
Wives are much the same. If nothing is mentioned about a birthday on the morning of the event, a person had better have to work. This gives them a lunch hour to make birthday dinner plans and find an appropriate gift. They can pretend they remembered all along and not have to deal with the panic button.
We have two trail cameras. We move them about the farm, taking pictures of wildlife. If a camera only has eight or 10 photos in a week, we move it to another location. It is a good thing we are both able to remember things well.
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Near the end of October, Bart and Kent came from Louisiana to hunt deer. I had hunted ducks and geese with Bart, but did not know his brother Kent. I had no idea how much experience they had bow hunting for deer. I wanted their hunt to be perfect in every way, but really had no idea how much help would be needed. I would hate to lose a couple perfectly good hunters on the first day out.
I need not have worried. Within a few hours, they were comfortable with the lay of the land and figured out where they wanted to be at what times. I turned them loose.
Two days later, my son Walter was arriving from Singapore with his fiancé, who had never been to the United States. We wanted her to feel welcomed as we worked on as many details as we could imagine. Our son had not been home for almost a year, so we planned special meals and events for him, as well as his intended.
Regular deer season started the first weekend of December. Our house is generally grand central for a few days. It had been over a month since either my wife or I had thought about the trail cameras. One quiet afternoon, we decided to go out, retrieve them, and download all our pictures.
Camera number one had 62 pictures; most of them does, but nice pictures nonetheless. We drove down the hill to the second camera, and it was gone. Panic immediately set in. Someone had stolen it. That was impossible. Nobody would trespass this far onto our property, and if they did, they would not steal a camera, even if they saw it. My wife started questioning my memory. Did I move it somewhere? Was it in the other truck? Did I leave it at Damon's house? The answer to all the questions was no. Somebody must have taken it. We started planning to purchase another, since having only one trail camera just will not do.
Last weekend, my wife and grandson were walking the edge of the timber looking for shed antlers while I walked the fence line on the other side of the creek. When she shouted to me she had found the camera, I was shocked. Someone must have moved it when we were not looking. When I saw where the camera was, we both remembered. On October 29, the day Bart and Kent arrived, we had been together when we placed the camera near a fresh scrape. We have 431 pictures, most of them of a branch blowing in front of the motion detector, but we do have our camera again.
If next year my wife forgets my birthday, I will understand. She is getting as old and forgetful as the guy that helped her set up the camera and forgot about it as though it never happened.
Walter Scott is an outdoors enthusiast and freelance writer from Bloomfield, Iowa.
