Previous Challenge Entry (Level 1 – Beginner)
Topic: Outlook (06/02/11)
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TITLE: One-eyed Cats and Chocolate Cake | Previous Challenge Entry
By Wilma Schlegel
06/09/11 -
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I never camped until I married Ben, and the experience took come getting used to. It’s been a lot of trial and error.
There was that hot smelly day when I trudged through the campground with Ben’s ever-smiling cousin.
She said, “Wow, it’s nice that they have washers and dryers here.”
“Yeah,” I agreed sarcastically, dragging a soggy, stinky, rain and little human soaked sleeping bag along behind me. As I stuffed the untouchable bulk of the thing into a washer, I continued so that she could understand the ridiculousness of the idea of camping, “At my house I have a washer and dryer and I don’t have to walk a quarter mile to use them.”
That evening, her husband turned the tables on me a bit when he made a foil covered box and baked a cake in it over the campfire.
Eyebrows lifted as I said, “Jim, this is amazing! I didn’t know this could be done.”
Jim smiled knowingly. (He was probably thinking - there’s a lot you don’t know.) He handed me a piece of warm and fluffy chocolate heaven.
Another time (almost every time) I was awakened in the night by a small voice. “Mommy, can you take me to the bathroom?”
Who doesn’t enjoy that? Ben, apparently, he always managed to sleep through it. And so, out I’d go, sleepily slipping my feet into one of my shoes and one of his waiting for us at the door and clopping down the rocky trail, little hand in mine, to the ‘rest facility’.
Ah yes, so many experiences to remember. There were screams from daughters - “There’s a toad in the shower!” or “There’s a daddy-long-legger on my plate!” Or a camper nearby helpfully yelling as we’d return wearily after an evening away, “You got a skunk at your picnic table!”
And then of course there was the time I almost had to walk home. Some kids outside of the camp store were trying to adopt out some stray kittens they had rescued. “Hey, lady,” they called to me (of course). “Do you want a kitten? - This one doesn’t have an eye.”
Twelve years and many vet visits later - the first one un-crusting that infected eye, I can tell you - that cat does have an eye. It has two of them and they’re both eyes for trouble. But still we keep our cat.
It’s been a long time but, we’re going camping again. The kids won’t be with us this time. Just us.
I think I’m excited. I think it will be fun! There’s an unwritten spiritual law that says, “outlook determines outcome”. How true that has been!
Ben and I are going camping.... I think I’ll bake him a chocolate cake, I think I’ll send some postcards to the kids (maybe they’ll have some with outhouses or at least spiders, toads, or skunks!), I think I’ll look forward to taking grandchildren some day! Most of all, I think I’ll praise the Lord for the experiences in the nature he created with the husband he’s given me. And I’ll praise Him also for a good outlook because as Proverbs 4:7 says, “As he thinks in his heart, so is he.”
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When you go camping, you really never know what to expect. Excellent descriptions.
The only thing I might change is using semi-colons and not comma's in the last paragraph.