The Twice Warming
Our pop-up camper trembles
under the onslaught of the wind, the canvas flaps snap until I tie them down.My family sits in the screen porch, the fabric diffusing some of the power, but all the games pieces must be held down by rocks. They are playing
Pandemic
, trying to save the world from the latest outbreak of disease. Sometimes fiction overlaps reality.
Conversations snatch and fling
into the boughs of the surrounding Ponderosa pines.Wildflowers from the nearby meadow - purple asters, white fleabane, and orange sneezeweed bend on solitary stems, tethered to the dirt. Earlier my daughter had picked handfuls and wove them into a flower crown that now lays discarded on the fold-up table.A five-year-old boy and seven-year-old girl dig a huge hole in the neighboring campsite, the damp dirt clings to everything. - their skin. Their clothes. Their shoes.
They laugh and dig deeper.
Wasn't it just yesterday my own children were covered with mud and laughter?
Hair flying in my face
, I sit on a camp chair and sip Earl Grey from a cup, the metal warming my hands, before the liquid warms my insides. I always drink tea from a metal cup while camping for this very reason.
The Twice Warming.
We have participated in
Family Camp
, as we call it, at this location near Mormon Lake, Arizona for almost three decades. The size of the group ebbs and flows, depending on the year, but it is an annual tradition. The one time I mentioned skipping the event because of the hassle of traveling on a holiday weekend, the family looked at me like I had suggested murdering my grandmother.
Winds of change have blown
and this year my youngest can't join the family. He is in college and no longer bound to family schedules, but I remember the years of him playing frisbee golf, making smores around the campfire or running for shelter from the rain.My fingers tighten around the warm metal. I take another sip of tea. I reminisce, while listening to the wind and my daughters' now-grown voices trying to save the world.The memories and traditions of countless years
tether my soul
during the winds of change.I live present, and at the same time remember three decades of years.
The Twice Warming.
hoary aster
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