Jasper's 21-inch bass.

It dumped rain on us. My seven-year-old landed a 21-inch largemouth bass from a canoe. We ate it that night, cast iron on the fire.

We packed for the best forecast and the worst one. Cots. Extra blankets. Wet boxes. A plan for the storm and a plan for the sun.

The storm won the morning. Not a drizzle, a real one. The kind that makes most trips get cancelled. We got in the canoe anyway.

The best trips are the ones you almost turned around from.

Jasper hooked it about forty minutes in. Twenty-one inches, largemouth, fat from a good summer. He fought it the whole way to the boat without saying a word. When he finally landed it, he looked at me like he'd just figured out that the world was bigger than he thought.

We cleaned the fish at camp. Bass, cast iron, butter, salt, a squeeze of lemon over a camp stove because the fire was still coming up. It was one of the best meals I've had in a decade and I've eaten in some rooms.

There's a version of this trip that gets cancelled at the first weather alert. The kid never touches the rod. The bass stays in the lake. Everyone drives back to the city and orders pizza.

Jasper will remember this one for the rest of his life. That's the thing I keep thinking about. The memories worth keeping are almost never the ones the weather agreed with.