Fishing in the backyards of Albany

Fishing in the backyards of Albany 29th Jan 2009
When I was young in Albany, after school, I'd climb the back yard picket fence.
My friend Franky Moore, as I knew him then, lived next to the giant white house where parades of soldiers gathered, some who stood to attention or came trouping in lines of green.
As I think about it now, they might have been on their way to Vietnam, some perhaps never to return.
I didn't think those thoughts then, no not at all, things like that don't occur to a child of why men stand in lines, no, my mind was full of the games of fishing which Frank and I played from the backyard fence that joined our two properties.
See the back garden was an ocean in disguise, the buffalo lawn was a shallow bay full of mullet, yellow-eyed herring and silver-sided skipjack that were swimming... The leaves on that lawn that lay littering his backyard was really an ocean full of fish where we planned out our strategies for the weekend ahead.
Some days when the weather was right, his father sometimes took us to the end of a long, very long, wooden jetty, that reached and ran out into the harbour.
In the shallows we'd watch the schools of mullet messing and swirling the otherwise still surface, and then walking to where the shallows gave way to green and the dark waters out back, we'd set ourselves down with our mess and tangles of lines...and wait...
And now, as I come to think about it, I guess it is not so strange that the sight of leaves on grass still carries memories of skipjack, of herring and mullet.
Maybe my love of gardening, still carries memories of being a child in Albany, still fishing...with green line wrapped around cork with hooks still half baited...and lead sinkers and hessian brown bags and buckets...
And when walking barefooted, atop the grass of home, when the wet dew dampens my feet and I see the odd leaf, I remember the fish, yellow-eyed, bright-eyed herring silver-skipjack and mullet in the shallows...