Fencerows: The Winter Beach Issue

 It happens about this time every year.  I graciously offer to do the grocery shopping and my wife suspiciously turns down the offer.  She knows something is up.  She knows I grumble even taking out the garbage and she knows the family can’t live on potato chips and Slim Jims for a week.

 “By all means, come with and carry the grocery bags, but I’ll do the actual shopping,” she says.

That’s how I find myself standing at the check out line, shooting hasty glances over my shoulder, waiting for the shopping ordeal to be over while looking at the magazine rack, specifically looking at a sporting magazine that is usually filled with baseball, basketball and football, except for once a year, when the annual bikini-clad cover hits the newsstand.

“Grow up and carry the groceries to the car,” she says.  We’ve been married for a lot of years.  I’ve no chance of straying.  She’d probably turn me loose in an instant, but she knows in her heart that no one else would take me in.

It’s not the swimsuits that fascinate me.  (Insert crude-humor joke here)  It’s not even the models wearing the swimsuits.  It’s the exotic beach backdrops, the bleached sand and lagoons of blue-green water, palm trees swaying in warm sea breezes.  Palm trees are hard to come by in Wisconsin this time of year.

 “Watch out for that ice,” says my wife.  She’s not worried about me falling.  I’ve navigated enough frozen patches by this point of the season.  She’s worried that I’ll drop the eggs.

No tan lines and sun-bleached hair. But our state is still bordered by two of the greatest fresh-water bodies in the world:  Lake Superior on our northern border and Lake Michigan stretching to our east.  By the time February rolls into March, the forces of nature have turned their trick along those beaches.  No bikinis, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t sights to behold.

“I wonder if there are people standing on those beaches who are tired of all that nice weather,” I tell my wife.  “A magazine issue showing snow and ice along the coastlines of Wisconsin would be a hit with them.  I’d put the picture of me holding that brown trout I caught in Lake Michigan on New Year’s morning on the cover.  The modeling offers would come rolling in.”

 “Grow up and carry the groceries into the house,” she says.

Grow up?  She should know better by now.  We’ve been married a lot of years. 

Modeling with a Lake Michigan brown trout.

Frozen sunrise over Lake Michigan.

Caves of ice.