Austin loved fishing from the time he was a little boy.

 Some of my favorite memories of him involve a fishing rod, a tackle box, and a body of water somewhere in North Carolina. Fishing wasn't just a hobby to Austin. It was part of who he was.

It started with time spent alongside his Papaw and then his Uncle Ryan,  They taught him the basics, but before long he had developed a talent for it all on his own.  He could throw a cast net perfectly every single time. It didn't matter if it was a lake, pond, river, creek, or some hidden patch of water he had stumbled across in the woods. If there were fish there, Austin was going to find them.  

  He always seemed to know about some secret fishing spot nobody else knew about. Sometimes getting there required a long walk through the woods, crossing creeks, climbing over fallen trees, or navigating places most people wouldn't bother with. To Austin, that was part of the adventure.

 Over the years, fishing became something special between Austin and his brother Wyatt.

 It was their thing.  Just about every Saturday that wasn't already spoken for involved looking at fishing gear, buying fishing gear, talking about fishing gear, and actually going fishing. They would disappear for hours and come home long after dark, dirty, soaking wet, smelling like fish, and carrying enough stories to fill an entire evening.

As a mother, I loved listening to those stories.

 The fish they caught.

The fish that got away.

The places they found.

The things that went wrong.  And there was always something that went wrong.

 There were fishing hooks that had to be cut out. Stitches from getting smacked with a fishing pole.

Mud holes that kept a shoe. Vehicle mishaps. Getting pulled over. Seeing just about every wild animal North Carolina has to offer. And somehow, losing the same john boat not once, not twice, but three separate times.

 To this day, I still don't completely understand how that's even possible.

 But those adventures became the stories that our family laughed about over and over again.

 Of course, there were also the fish.

 Some of them were truly impressive. Austin had a knack for finding big fish in places where nobody expected them to be. Whether it was skill, patience, luck, or some combination of all three, he seemed to have a way of making fishing stories worth telling.

 What I loved most wasn't the fish, though. It was the bond.

I was always proud of the relationship Austin and Wyatt had. I watched them spend countless hours together on the water, and like every mother, I imagined that one day they would be grown men with families of their own, still loading up fishing poles and heading out for another adventure together.

 Those are some of the dreams that disappear when someone dies.

 There hasn't been a whole lot of fishing since we lost Austin.

 The rods are still there.

 The tackle is still there.

 The stories are still there.

 But something is missing.

 Sometimes I find myself wishing I could hear just one more fishing story. One more tale about getting stuck, getting lost, catching something enormous, or doing something that probably wasn't the best idea but somehow made for a great memory.

 My heart still longs for those stories.

 And maybe that's why this page exists.

 Not to document the fish Austin caught.

 But to remember the life he lived while chasing them.