smiles on our faces and peace in our hearts

After dinner last night Ron thought it would be a good idea to have a campfire, he was right! The great thing about our property (they are SO many others as well...) is that it is wooded, thickly wooded. Which means we never have to look too far to find wood for a campfire. Having thickly wooded property is good, cannot see the neighbors and bad because there are lots of blow downs. Coreah loves it, we've no need of a chipper, she's a buzz saw on 4 legs! She'll grab onto an end of a blow down and drag it out of the woods for us, then proceed to chew it up all over the lawn.... until we put it in the campfire. No worries, she'll just go get another one.

It was a long day mentally and just what I needed to get over it, just exactly what is is that when you're around a campfire takes away all stress and anxiety of a bad day? We all sat out there as a family around the fire and occasionally the goats would wander over to see if we'd cracked open the s'mores, vegetarian of course! It was 10:30 before we came in and headed to bed with smiles on our faces and the peacefulness of a campfire in our hearts.

Harley enjoyed it too.

Welcome November

Pull up a stump and gather around our campfire! There is something to be said for having a day of rest, our day of rest was spent around a campfire, laughing, enjoying each others company, eating roasted veggie dogs and (vegan) marshmallows and washing it all down with apple cider. Shortly after we moved here there was a tree, (which I thought was cedar) that for what ever reason just died. What a huge stately tree it was, well aside from being too near the house for comfort it was unsightly now that it was dead and it needed to go. Ron took it down last week and Friday we limbed it and cut the trunk up. Our intention was to split it and use it as firewood but after the first stump chunk was whacked about a hundred times and went nowhere fast we decided that maybe between the size of it and all the knots that maybe it was too much for Lola to handle, but since we do not own a wood splitter we had a problem.... or so we thought. (Did I mention that it was hemlock and full of knots!?) Sunday arrives, the weather could not have been better for an outside kind of day, you know the kind where you're out in just a long sleeve shirt and revel in the warmth of what you know will be one of the last warm days of fall. So I decided to burn the rest of what we could not use as firewood; limbs, bits of the trunk, etc. We sat on the ground around the fire for a while then an idea popped into my head, I jumped up and rolled the stumps over to the fire and sat down! Duh, what a better way to use the stately old tree! These stumps are perfect for gathering around a campfire, there is one for each member of my family plus extras for company! What is it about a campfire that offers universal connectedness anyway? No matter where you go when people gather around a campfire you experience a closeness that seems primitive yet comforting. Is it the hypnotic flames dancing and licking at the night sky? Is it the warmth that only wood fire can bring? The snapping and crackling of the fire itself? I'm not sure but I know the world seems to fade away when I am surrounded by those whom I love and a simple campfire.