“Yeah, it was great. We primitive camped. Maybe at Chicot? I can’t remember.” Greta sounds lost in the story. “She taught me how to find dry firewood, build a fire, and break it down safely before we went to sleep. How to stay warm in my sleeping bag and get dressed in its heat the next morning.”
I’m grinning in the darkness, picturing a kindergartner with Greta’s curls, scrunched in a sleeping bag like a caterpillar. “How long was the trip?”
She sniffs a laugh. “Oh, it was just one night, but I remember so much about it, it feels like we camped for a week.”
“Those kinds of memories are the best.”
“What about you?” Her voice sounds like she’s come back to the present. “When was the first time you went camping?”
“Oh gosh, I was probably ten or eleven. It was a disaster.”
“Oh no.” Greta chuckles. “Tell me about it.”
Another hard gust shakes the camper, and I just smile. What could be better than lying here in bed with Greta, talking about our childhoods while a storm rages around us.
I’m suddenly damn glad for that leaky skylight.
“I had this neighborhood friend named Ivan.”
“Sounds like trouble.”
“Oh, he was.”
“You name a kid Ivan, you’re just asking for mayhem,” she says with authority, making me laugh.
“He was named after his grandfather, and considering the rest of the story, you may be onto something.”
“Okay, spill it.” She shifts under the covers, and in the dimness, I can just make out that she’s tucked an arm under her pillow, propping her head just up a little more for the story.
“Ivan’s grandpa, the aforementioned Ivan the First, had a farm in Ville Platte. We got the idea that we should camp out in one of his fields. I think the thing we were most focused on was building a fire,” I recall, reminiscing about that keen sense of freedom I’d never tasted before. “I mean, fire had always been forbidden. To a ten-year-old boy, playing with fire is as alluring and off-limits as seeing a pair of boobs—”
Her fit of laughter triggers my own, and we both need a minute.
“That’shilarious—”
“W-Well.” I chuckle, wiping my eyes, “It’s a short-lived window when those two things rank equally in the mind of a male—”
She breaks up again, and, God, how I love that sound.
“Anyway, we put about ninety percent of our efforts and attention on building and stoking the fire and about six percent of it on setting up his grandfather’s old army-issue tent.”
Greta clears her throat and chances her breath. “What about the other four percent?”
“That was for the hot dogs. No buns. No condiments. Just a pack of weenies and a couple of sticks.”
Her giggles bubble over again. “You tell a good story.”
I’m glad she can’t see it because my smile is a supernova.
“Well, when it got late, we climbed into the tent with our stomachs full of charred, processed meat, and we stayed up for a bit with the flash light and the big screen of the tent walls for our entertainment, and then I guess we fell asleep in our sleeping bags.”
“I’m bracing for the worst—”
I love that Greta’s on the edge of her seat—or her pillow, in this case—her concentrated, undivided attention is the ultimate dopamine hit.
“Sometime after midnight, the skies opened—”
“Uh oh.”