You Shouldn’t Forget the Marshmallows

Last week was a summery one, hazy skies of smoke one day, glittery sunshine the next, warm breezes, earth so dry that driving in the lane raised a cloud of dust. We planned a camping trip with the cousins at a park between our houses. Gabe is currently working in Altoona, so he was going to meet us at the campground after his three shifts were finished for the week.

With that in mind, we made lists and gathered supplies for camping before he left for work. My contribution is always the food and the comforts, such as bug spray and sleeping bags and making sure everybody takes jackets and socks for the nights. I have a tote with just camping gear: old dishes and utensils, cracked mugs, lighter, ratty tea towels and dishcloths, soap, bucket, dishpan, plastic tablecloth, foil, salt and pepper, etc. But I always have to inspect the tote to be sure nothing has gone AWOL or been emptied.

I’m also in charge of provisions, and experience has taught me that starving people aren’t very fun to camp with, so the criteria for meals is simple and nutritious. I can only pull out the Ramen or the instant oatmeal so many times before there are problems with the protein intake. With that in mind, I planned to make my Saturday meal mostly on our Coleman stove: grilled chicken breast, fettucine with Alfredo sauce, and green beans. Actual vegetables toted into the wilderness. I lofted my nose into the air at the thought of using canned Alfredo and bought cream and parmesan instead. This should have been a red flag in my own head that something was not working properly in my brain, but apparently it didn’t flag insistently enough.

I had a huge distraction in my week, because I realized that I would have to put my Father’s Day mugs on Etsy quickly so that I could ship them before we left so that people would get them in time for gifts. It wasn’t very many, but it took brain space and a number of hours posting and packing them. Would you like to see how they turned out?

This spring I messed with underglaze transfers on mugs and I was pretty happy with the result, even if they were fiddly. Anyway, I got the mugs sold and packaged, took them to the P.O. and then went right to Aldi’s for the groceries for camping.

I was keeping a list of things in my mind that I hadn’t written on my list, always a risky thing to do, especially when planning to cook things like Alfredo sauce in the woods. The girls and I gathered everything together for Gregory to load on the fishing boat as soon as he got home from work. I kept thinking of last minute things like shoes, a mattress cover for the air mattress so it isn’t so chilly, towels for the showers. Seriously, camping in a civilized manner means so much to remember! We got everything loaded and strapped down, the huge tote of tents and sleeping bags in the boat, two kayaks on top of that, and our backpacks and food in the Sub.

Setting up camp is always a jolly thing. Gabriel is a master at putting up tents and figuring out where the best places are for each thing. He did notice that I had bought the wrong kind of fuel for our aging camp stove so he and Greg went on a ride to pick up camp wood and the right kind of fuel.

The girls have a small tent they can erect by themselves and so does Gregory. I put the bedding on our mattress and noticed that I forgot our pillows, but oh well, we can always wad up some jackets or something to put under our necks. We circled our camp chairs around the fire and chatted with the cousins. Good times. Deluxe hamburgers and strawberry pie for supper made by my sister-in-law, Ruby. Enormous trees arching overhead, foxes yipping in the woods, cool air swirling. Ahhh.

At some point I French-braided the whole row of girls in what we call a “three-day-hairdo” and they hit the woods swathed in tick and mosquito repellent. The play was dramatic and absorbing. Lady took on the role of sniffer dog. I heard one small girl say to the dog, “Go find them, Killer.” The fiercest thing about Lady was her vicious tail-wagging excitement at being involved in the game, but she obliged them by sniffing everywhere.

We discovered that the camp bathrooms were the grossest we have ever experienced at a campground, and we have seen dozens. A dip in a river or a lake would be preferable for cleanliness, but at least the water was hot and you could wear flip-flops in the shower.

Bedtime was late, and the pillow situation was more problematic in our middle age than it used to be in our youth. We coped, though, and settled onto our mattress. Our new, inflatable mattress, I might add, that fits just right in the tent because Gabe did his homework and got the right size. I shouldn’t have read the reviews, because I was skeptical from the start, but that mattress definitely seemed to be losing air, just like the reviews said. Gabe was sleeping before we hit the ground, and I tried to sleep for a few hours, but gave it up as a lost cause about the time the raccoons found the tin pie plates from the strawberry pie and rattled them around. We had neglected to stow the trash out of reach and they were ready for the party.

Astonishingly, Gabe slumbered on, so I decided to crawl out and find a zero gravity chair for a bed. That woke him, and he did some troubleshooting, discovering that the one inflation valve wasn’t properly shut. After he inflated the mattress again with the last gasps of battery in our air pump, I gave it another try. It was better and I slept a few hours before we hit the ground again. That time I did crawl out and find a chair to tilt back for sleeping.

I drank real coffee that morning after my daughter suggested that I may be a little grouchy. It helped to enliven my weary bones and we had a lovely day. As I was assembling my ingredients for supper, I noticed a conspicuous lack of garlic. If you have ever had Alfredo without garlic, you haven’t had Alfredo. The small town of Tionesta was nearby, so we ladies went questing for garlic and found a cute thrift store with tiny withered ladies presiding over it “for the church”. Most things cost less than a dollar. Books for 10 cents? Is that even a thing anymore? Gabriel texted me to check if they have any pillows there. I didn’t see any.

When we got back, I assembled my ingredients. Gabriel tried to start the stove a-burning, but it would not hold the pressure needed to ignite the burner. After much trying, we gave up and made a plan for cooking over the fire. First the sauce, then the green beans, then we grilled the chicken and lastly made a blazing fire to bring a pot of water to a rolling boil for the pasta. It took forever. By the time the noodles were cooked, the rest of the food had cooled considerably under its foil covers. But it was good anyway.

The girls had seen a recipe for making Mexican s’mores by putting mini marshmallows and chocolate chips on a smear of peanut butter inside a tortilla. You fry them to melt all the gooey things together, and they had their hearts set on that even though I also had the ingredients for doing strawberry cheesecake dessert tortillas. Guess what? I forgot the marshmallows. By this point, I was ready to admit that my head was somewhere else when I was packing. I am quite sure it was busily thinking, because I was with it, after all.

Gregory saved the day by driving to a ubiquitous Dollar General about a mile out of town. Which raises the question: are you even camping if you are that close to a D.G.? And the answer is yes. In our neck of the woods, you practically trip over them all over the countryside and they are very handy too. If only we had told Gregory to get pillows.

We inflated the mattress again with a recharged inflater, very full, and very hard. That night it held. We stayed suspended on a brick, four inches above the ground for the whole night. The raccoons didn’t show up either, so we slept.

It was a good time. Relaxing, visiting, eating, drinking tea, and washing dishes in tepid water with questionable floating things in it. Everything packed down nicely and we came home to run the washer and the shower and to scrub the blackened cooking pots.

I was sinking into our wonderful bed when I got the text from my mom that her brother, Paul Miller, had died suddenly while taking a walk. In an instant, their family is changed forever. The shock and sadness of it kept me awake for quite a while, thinking.

What did it matter about pillows and marshmallows? What does anything matter in the face of loss and death? And how is it so easy to forget that we are all marching along to our graves?

My uncle Paul loved Jesus and he loved people. He had a tender heart toward anybody who was hurting or lonely, spending hours on the phone to stay connected with loved ones. That will be the part of him that will live on: his kindness and love.

I was thinking about this, and about the indisputable fact that we have to keep living in the world, living well, even though it will all pass away in the end. We buy Pampers for the baby shower, make finger jello for the picnic, and pick flowers for the table, all while marching step by step toward the day when we meet God. We do impractical things like setting up housekeeping in the woods and letting our children get gloriously dirty, making memories with their friends, presumably because we love them and we have only a certain number of days with them.

We keep living and we keep loving because that is what we are supposed to do. We are given this one wildly precious life and the people around us to share it. We pour out our love with funny things like marshmallows and story hour and French braids. I do not know how God takes the raw ingredients of what we offer to Him and to our loved ones and makes them a beautiful thing.

That is His work and He is good at it.