Looking Up at Stars

Purchased from a local market where cashier women ogled our Baby and selective certain items like peppers weren’t available, tonight’s fire is born of local fallen timber and campstore cut kindling alike as it boils our aforementioned purchase into an evening’s meal. A can of black beans and refrieds, opened with a pair of pliers, a flathead screwdriver and no less than four cheap butterknives after a can opener misplacement mishap, mixed knee deep with a single small white onion and a clump of pre-shredded “Mexican-style” cheese heat up in a tin foil sack alongside a lightweight camping stove, it’s heatproof silicone handle melted two day old hotdog-like from use, brewing steamy a double serving’s worth of long grain rice. Lady sits in the Bus calming a waking Baby.

Above me a few stars dare show their face between silhouettes of Massachusetts flora of a decidedly deciduous nature. Two short and one tall candle flicker on a picnic table between the fire and our Bus. Crickets go choir and any trace of fellow campers is lost as aside from our flames, only a distant bathroom light beacons into the after 10pm.

Tomorrow means back into Vermont, and a glance at our atlas reveals a beautiful and marked-as-scenic two lane trail through the Green Mountains for the majority duration of an almost pilgrimage back to Burlington’s outskirts.

The beans smell done…