Campfire Breakfast

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The boy woke before the others, when the woods were still gray and the birds had not yet decided what kind of morning it would be. He crawled from the tent wearing yesterday’s jeans and a sweatshirt that smelled faintly of smoke. The fire was mostly gone, but beneath the white ashes he found a few red coals waiting for him. He fed them pine needles first, then twigs, then two pieces of wood his father had split the night before. He blew gently until a small flame appeared. It seemed like a secret the earth had trusted him to keep.

He set the black skillet over the fire and dropped in three strips of bacon. They curled and snapped, and the smell moved through the trees faster than daylight. He cracked two eggs against the side of the pan the way he had watched his father do, although one shell broke badly and he had to fish a piece from the white with a stick. He laughed quietly. There was bread to toast near the coals and coffee boiling in the old blue enamel pot, though his father had told him he was still too young for coffee. The boy poured himself water instead and sat on a log, watching the eggs turn white around their bright yellow centers. Nothing had ever smelled so good.

Soon there would be voices from the tents and footsteps through the leaves. His father would come out rubbing sleep from his eyes and pretend to be surprised that breakfast was already waiting. But for another minute the boy had the whole morning to himself, the smoke rising straight through the pines, the bacon sizzling, the creek talking somewhere beyond the trees. He turned the eggs carefully and understood, without knowing the words for it, that someday he would remember this morning long after he had forgotten what year it was. He would remember the little fire he had made with his own hands, and how, for a few quiet minutes before the world woke up, he had been old enough to take care of it.


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