It was already raining as we ate pizza downtown at Capone’s, my 5-year-old son and I, and at the campground I realized in the downpour that my tent didn’t have stakes with it.
We slept on the porch of a vacated cabin. We listened to the rain and played card games like war and rummy in the light of our headlamps, and my son ate one large marshmallow after another that we’d bought for s’mores.
“Can I have another one?” he’d ask each time.
“Sure.”
I think we finally slept and when we woke it was the cows in the field nearby that woke us. It had stopped raining.
Now that we live here we understand two things about rain and cows—constant and everywhere. Now that we live here and my son is 17 we sometimes drive by Ray Brown Road and I point.
“That’s—
“Yes. I know. We camped there the first time we ever came to Boone,” he says.
And as you can see from the photo, I recently drove by to reminisce.