An Ode to Fire and Donna...

 One Match . . .

At the edge of the lake

It started with some 

Carefully assembled twigs

And Camp Counselor knowledge 

Learned in the greenest days of life

When it’s done, when it’s ready 

It’s a mountain shaped from logs

With uneven, broken edges

And guts made of those twigs

Ascending from the rocky ground 

As dusk settles into night 

With firestick on hand she says to me

“One match . . .”

As if she’s Michael Jordan

Calling out a three 

Subtly the guts start to percolate

But in no time the whole mountain 

Is all chimney red and halloween orange

Alas . . .

She is Michael Jordan

From there we sit in our chairs

Breathing in the fragrant burning timber

Listening to the nightsounds

Looking on with sweet glazed eyes 

At the mountain of fire

We don’t say much, but at some point

As the fire grows too large 

She turns to me again

And with that big Camp Counselor smile 

She says, “Whoa.”

But it’s not a “Whoa,” of

This is too big 

This is too large

It’s a “Whoa,” of pride

One Match . . . Michael Jordan

We turn on some music 

As the mountain collapses in on itself

We still don’t say much

But she gets up 

To reposition the diminishing logs

And while she works says to me 

With a certain smugness  

Like I’m a some dimwitted rube

Who would need fossil fuels to blaze anything

“A fire needs air, a fire needs to breathe”

Eventually the night ends 

She separates what remains of the logs

We pack up our things

And with a deep satisfaction 

We return to the cottage

In the morning, our last morning

I go to sit by the water a last time

Approaching, I smell the smoldering wood

And see a smoking fingernail in the ash

One Match . . . Michael Jordan

There’s a song lyric

After the fire, the fire still burns   

But rather than memory or metaphor 

I’d rather have another fire

Than go back

Home
How we got here...
An Ode to Fire and Donna
Chronological Posts From The Road 
Going Mobile: What We Learned
Our Rig: A Pictorial Essay