Last weekend we camped in the pouring rain.
It put up a fight, those clouds – twenty-four hours of pouring rain, all through the dark night and dim morning. I curled up into C.’s nook in the narrow of our tent under piles of fleece and slush pants, wondering if it would ever stop.
And so what of rain? What of being wet and cold and soggy? What of love? What of adventure? And isn’t that why we camp? For the mission? The Yes! moment that comes from the perfect knot, the just-right tarp set-up, the perfect red hot coals for marshmallow-toasting?
As my darling Jenn says on the matter of camping, “You slip (literally and metaphorically) into the earth, feeling less and less separate from it. You love it because it’s hard. It asks a lot of you and if you commit, it gives so much in return.”
“But what do you do when you’re camping?” My mother asked. “You just sit in the pouring rain?” She wondered out loud, worrying about my bones and if they’d caught a cold.
I’m not sure how the time passed, but it did – we wondered out loud, we traipsed through the woods, we looked up at the sky…
We watched the leaves turning red, we looked under rocks for creatures, we wondered where all the roots had come from and where they were going…
We got ourselves lost, we stopped to look at the map and to eat peanut M&Ms…
We pulled our hoods and one another in closer…
Then, as if a switch had clicked, the spell was broken and sun streamed through the trees.
I was a little disappointed it was over, somewhere in the back of my mind.
The sounds that had permeated my consciousness and kept me fixated on the moment were suddenly gone – the loud chorus of raindrops against the tarp, the swishing of the tree tops in the wind, C’s constant and soft breaths warm on the back of my neck.
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Gah, so beautiful. I’m so glad to have shared that with you.
Also I LOVE that photo of C.
Perfection.
Melly has a knack for capturing candid moments.