I don’t know about you but I feel like the best nights of my life have been marked by campfires. There were the campfires of my childhood, on camping trips along a creek that fed the waterfalls and gorges of Stonybrook and Letchworth parks, with the brush so lit up with fireflies it looked like the stars had come down from the sky and were spending the night with us.
There were the campfires in friends back yards for the fifth of November, and at their family’s lake house on Ontario where we had combed the shore for sea glass and pretty rocks all that day.
There were the campfires in the hills above Alfred University my first year of college. There was the campfire where I met my future husband, and the campfire we had the night after we got married, when the mess had been cleaned up and everyone had gone home and we ate s’mores by the lake and were glad to have no one to talk to but each other.
I say often that there’s only a small number of perfect summer nights in a lifetime (here in Upstate NY, at least). But with a campfire to keep you warm on the nights that are a little too cold or maybe a little too buggy, I can hope there will be enough perfect nights to satisfy.
Like this one. It was only 48 degrees in mid-June, but we had a campfire, we had s’mores, and I can only hope that this night will be added to the tally of perfect nights my niece experiences in her lifetime. Since she’s only two, I’ll keep track of this one for her.
