The day tightens into itself like a drawn bowstring, each hour humming a little sharper, a little faster, pulling toward the inevitability of evening. And in that slow, gleaming tension—there it is: the thought, the promise, the certainty of dinner.

Fried walleye.

Twice baked potatoes.

It enters the mind not as a thought, but as a calling. The crisp crackle of hot oil just barely imagined, the golden batter whispering as it stiffens into armor around the soft, pale fish inside. Walleye: clean as a river dream, tender as a hush. You can almost smell it even though it’s hours away—the mix of cornmeal, salt, pepper, oil hot enough to mean business. Somewhere deep down, something stirs like a bear rolling in its sleep at the first whiff of spring.

And beside it—oh, the potatoes. Not just baked, not merely roasted. Twice baked. As if one life was not enough for them. As if they were born, died, and resurrected into something even better: whipped with butter and sour cream, loaded with cheddar, bacon, chives—every warmth the earth can offer piled into the skin of something that already knew hardship. Their skin, toughened and leathered by the oven’s first kiss, now shelters a filling so soft it might as well be cloud or song.

You think of the plates—heavy plates, no nonsense, the kind that clang when you set them down. You think of the knife breaking the crust of the fish with a sigh. You think of the fork digging into the potato and the buttery core spilling out, golden and steaming, like a secret you finally earned the right to hear.

All through the late afternoon, time drips a little slower, gathering itself into a river heading for one inevitable place: that first bite. You imagine it will crack and steam, tender and crisp, a fish that tastes like the last true thing on earth. You imagine the salt and pepper sparkling on your tongue, the soft, molten potato beside it. You imagine the second bite before you even finish the first.

And so the waiting becomes its own sort of feast—the dreaming of it, the knowledge of it, the slow steady drumbeat under the ribcage that says:

Soon.

Soon.

Soon.