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Saturday, February 5, 2011

"Taste Like Burnt Wrubba"

So I have so many other things I should be blogging about and catching up on in life yet I feel the need to share some very treasured memories for a few moments if I can figure out how to put them into thoughts that other people would understand. 

For starters I guess I should explain that as a kid there is not a single spring break, or summer that I can think of that didn't involve a camping trip with my grams and gramps and thanks to all those camping trips I now have a love for the out doors (not quite the back packer love for the out doors though) and most things nature related (flowers, tress, birds, you know the normal things minus the snakes, spiders, and creepy crawly things).  To this day when I smell a fire burning I get a smile and say "wow, smells like camping", or when I go outside on a cool spring morning and hear birds singing, fell the dew on the grass, and the morning sun starting to come rise I say, "hey this is a camping day".  In the fall when the leaves start to turn I love to take drives up through the mountains and go for a short ride through the Blue Ridge and just look at all the colors and enjoy the sights I know my grandparents use to love. 

To this day I still love thinking about all those camping trips, all the way from the great ones where they let my little brother and I go "creeking" or when we would go hiking and thanks to gramps being in the lead end up hiking all the way around the mountain rather than up the mountain, to the times when we would go down to the Kentucky Horse Park on spring break and it would rain the whole week so we would sit in the camper and play card games, and I could go on and on.  Each story brings a smile to my face as I think about the time spent with two very amazing and loving grandparents who were brave enough to take two kids off in to the mountains with them for a week to give their parents a break every spring and then again in the summer.  I hate to admit it but each story also now brings tears as I think about how much I miss those times and regret that as I got older I complained more and more about being the girl that had to spend her spring breaks with her grandparents, like it was a bad thing.  My how if we only knew then what we know now.

Sorry, sorry I know you are all wondering what any of this has to do with "Taste Like Burnt Wrabba" so I better get to the explaining and save all the reminiscing stories for another time, maybe one when I am home with mom and a good glass of whine so we can laugh together the stores. 

When you go camping what is the one thing you always make? Smores, or well its one thing that I always grew up making.  What when you think of a nice warm gooey marshmellow resting nicely on top of a bed of chocolate and squeezed between two gram crackers you don't think of burnt rubber? Well sadly one of my fondest memories that involves marshmellows is the fallowing:

I remember a time when I was younger where my mom, grams, brother, gramps, and I were all sitting around a campfire one night after dinner when someone asked grams where the marshmellows were.  So grams being the great grams she was got up and went into the camper where she had a nice big back of marshmellows all ready for us to enjoy.  Mom opens the bag and is the first to grab out a marshmallow only to find it is hard as a rock.  Sadly we didn't let this little minor detail deter us as we went a head and stock those little "rocks" on some sticks and stuck them out over the fire to roast them.  I have always been a big fan of letting my marshmellows catch on fire so that they are all nice and black and crispy, but that yet again is not the point.  When it was time for all of us to enjoy our smores mom bit in to hers and with a little laugh and her mouth full said what should of been "taste like burnt rubber" but thanks to it being full of a very gooey and very stale marshmellow it came out like "taste like burnt wrubba". 

As I sit here and tell this story I can hear mom and grams laughing in the background as if it were happening right now.  I now also get the feeling that this is one of those stories where you had to be there in order for it to be "pee your pants funny" like it is for me.  I wish mom was here to help make sure I got that story right but in the end it doesn't matter I guess because the main point was it was a time full of laughter, family, love, and "burnt wrabba" something that my family still jokes about today. 
Tonight I went in to the kitchen and was reminded by what I call the "grams tap" that I had some marshmellows under the stove.  I was so happy to see that I had maybe 4 or 5 left, I mean what are the odds we got them at least 3 or 4 months ago.  As I offered one to Ryan I went to bite in to the one in my hand and thought I might of just broken a tooth.  This really stale marshmellow took me back to my childhood faster than you can say, "bobs your uncle" and I was once again sitting around a camp fire with everyone laughing about the one and only time grams every had stale marshmellows (she never let it happen again after that if she could, but really only the kids ate them so they would go months at a time in the camper without anyone messing with them).  Next thing I know I have our little gas stove going and a fork in my marshmellow and am roasting that sucker over the flame just thinking about great times I had around a camp fire. 

Now poor Ryan is trying to figure out what in the world with me as I sit here crying and laughing over "Burnt Wrabba".  That poor boy has no clue that I will never be normal and I have to thank that to a childhood full of amazing memories like this one!  If only I had a photo of one of those great camping trips on my computer to share with all of you.  Let me get back to that as I now want to see what I can do.

1 comment:

Chas said...

Cute story! Hope your tooth is okay!