(Sunday Paper, Year V, Issue 21)

There weren’t many fire pits in my neighborhood growing up.

I imagine they’re probably not allowed - too many buildings and yards close together - there’s no way something wouldn’t catch fire.

And even when we weren’t at home - it wasn’t something that was part of our experience.

We weren’t campers, so no campfires.

Other than barbecues, we just weren’t involved in activities that involved outdoor fires.

That changed in my adult years.

I’ve been around more fires since my early twenties or so.

Various people have had them in some form or another - mostly just fire pits in the yard. (I’ve still never been camping.)

But I was always content to enjoy them sitting back, away from the responsibility of lighting or putting out said fire.

Then, a few years ago, we were invited to a friend’s house for a cookout.

It was a very good time.

Towards the end of the evening the host set up the fire pit, near which I had been sitting, thrust some skewers and marshmallows at me, and said, “John, you’re in charge of the S’mores!”

I panicked as the kids came rushing in my direction. I had never even had a S’more, let alone been in charge of a group of kids around a fire needing to make them.

Luckily I was able to pawn off the task on another parent.

You may remember when we took our trip to North Carolina in 2018 that I had another S’mores experience - this time I was more active in the roasting of the marshmallows - with my own kids, but under strict guidance from others - and that’s where I fell in love with S’mores. I think I had one cookout S’mores experience since then…

….until this weekend.

One of our goals this summer was to get a fire pit for the yard. That got accelerated a bit with the stay-at-home orders, and I bought one last week. (Me with a fire pit? I can hardly believe it either.)

I put it together, and this weekend we lit it up for the first time.

it’s a propane-fueled pit - I’m comfortable with propane from my barbecuing experiences. (Fun story - I bought a new tank for the pit, and it wouldn’t light and I thought it was a failure and I was on the verge of taking the pit apart and calling for a replacement when I switched to the tank from the grill and that worked…and the newer tank successfully lit the grill. Crisis averted.)

I was a little wary of the lava rocks, because I didn’t have any experience with them. But I looked up some information about them and it seems that they’re fine. I was put at ease before the first lighting.

It was a little windy (and cold) Saturday evening, but we had a successful fire pit test run. Everyone had a S’more, the dog handled the fire relatively well, and everything turned off the way it was supposed to.

I’m looking forward to spending a couple of cool summer nights sitting by the hot fire with a cold drink.

Notes

I just have a couple of other things to catch you up on this week:

*Guys, the grass is growing! This is just about the most exciting thing to happen in the past 10 weeks. I was about to give up hope and figured I just didn’t have the ability to plant anything and have it grow - and then the cutest little baby grass blades started popping up. And there are more and more of them each day.

It started happening about a week after I put the seed down, and I was going to give it two weeks before I declared all hope was lost. Now I’m excited to see where we’ll be at the two-week mark this coming week.

*I am really enjoying the Facebook Live videos. They’re getting me to re-visit old pieces of writing and experiences I hadn’t thought about in a long time, and they’re also a way to release some of the stuff going on in my brain lately, without having a stage to work it out on. So it’s been positive for me - I hope people have been enjoying them.

I’m going to continue to do them Monday through Friday (and this evening I’ll be reading this) - Monday early, Tuesday mid-day, Wednesday late, Thursday mid-day, and Friday early. I think I’ll keep the schedule vague like that because that seems to be working. If you happen upon them, watch it live. If not, check it out later.

And feel free to comment - I like the interactivity when that happens. Even if you watch it later - I’ll respond.

*If for some reason you didn’t come to the Sunday Paper through the Facebook page, you can go Like that page at this link, and you can also follow me on Twitter at this link.

*What a shame that the yard has never been better prepared to receive visitors….and we probably shouldn’t do that right now.