The photo was one of the first images in our family album before we lost our mementos in a flood: my mother, wearing a wide-striped T-shirt indicative of the early 1980s, holding a big-bodied silver fish as long as her forearm over the sink as she smiles at the camera, proud of her catch. Mom didn’t start fishing until she was an adult, when my father introduced her to the hobby. In the early days of their marriage, they spent hours on the shores of lakes in South Carolina, Alabama, Tennessee—wherever their management jobs sent them. Sitting on five-gallon buckets, hoping to outfish each other, the farmer’s son and the mason’s daughter tried to figure out what love looked like.
For a long time, my parents could not afford to be catch-and-release-type people. Their family, which later grew to include me and my little brother, Nicholas,
