It's campfire time ...

I don't want you to think this is my first campfire of the year. I have used up about half of my woodpile so far this year. But now it's getting to be REAL campfire time. You know, the time when you wear jeans and some sort of heavier top to sit around the fire.

Up till now, I've been wearing shorts and a T-shirt most of the time, and I would constantly have to adjust the distance I would sit from the fire because it would vary from singing the hair on my legs by being too close, to being a blood bank for the mosquitoes who would buzz just out of reach of the smoke.

Now, though, it's time for the real campfires. I'm talking about the ones that mesmerize you as you sit there with the tip of your nose getting just a little cold, and you sit up close without worrying about sparks, or bugs or singed leg hair or things like that.

The fire ring is right on the edge of the pond, and I sit listening to the fish come up after the bugs on the water. I also watch the bats come out of the barns and swoop down for water and some of the emerging bugs. If I have fed the fish that night, they will go on splashing around most of the night getting food and chasing other fish. It is really quite relaxing. And then throw in star gazing... there are so many stars out on these clear nights. Being in the country, we aren't bothered by light pollution so they seem so bright you can almost reach up and touch them. We're also near one of the major midwest air "cross roads" -- the Rosewood VOR -- so there are lots of planes in the sky with their twinkling red and green marker lights.

Another real nice thing about sitting out there at night is I usually have my two best buds with me. Pam will sit out there a lot of nights, but Bailey is there every time I have a fire going. At times she will dig in the sand at the beach like she's looking for a long-ago buried bone, but most of the time she will just lie on the grass next to us.

Another thing I like about sitting by the fire at night, is going to bed later. Usually the smoke from the fire gets in your hair (and for me that's quite a challenge these days) and when you lie down, the smell gets in your pillow and is with you all night and greets you when you awake in the morning.

There's just something about a campfire that makes one slow down, take it in and absorb everything around it. I feel sorry for those who live in outdoor areas where campfires have legislated away. I feel sorry too for those who live where their tiny lots cannot accommodate a campfire. Those people have lost something. The human spirit needs places where nature has not been rearranged or regulated by the hand of man. In his work, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, Lord Byron said:

There is a pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is a rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society, where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar:
I love not man the less, but Nature more.

God writes the gospel not in the Bible alone, but on trees and flowers and clouds and stars (Ed. note: and campfires, too). Martin Luther

Hooah