Saturday, June 23, 2012

Summer Snapshot 3- Front Yard Fire Pit

The evenings start with the kids in the pool, someone collecting old wood from the shed that is partially down, and someone else building the fire. Kids are splashing and laughing and the wood crackles and starts and the cats try to sit on laps and are entirely too secure in how much I love them.

We have spent hours around the fire pit, roasting hot dogs and marshmallows and quoting books and movies, telling jokes and listening to Cub and Flower read Charlie Brown and Calvin and Hobbes sketches to us. They have had a year long love affair with Charlie and Co. and can tell you fascinating bits of trivia about Charles Schultz and Brown, have memorized entire pages of the comic books and movies and laugh uproariously at certain sketches. Flower does a mean imitation of Sally and can't decide if she wants to be Sally or Lucy to Cub's Charlie.

The rest of us put our feet up and watch the fire. We are all self proclaimed fire starting/tending experts so there is usually some banter about how to put the wood on, and how much and when. Not that any of us are opinionated or anything.

Inevitably, as dusk deepens into night, Flower starts counting stars and pretty soon we are all looking upward. Viking Man is pointing out constellations and planets and  we are all saying how beautiful it all is. And when we take our eyes off the sky we are mesmerized by the fireflies cavorting in the fields. Too soon, and too late, the fire fades and we meander in and to bed.

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