...an opened jar of orange blossom honey with bits of honeycomb in it, an opened jar of coconut butter, an opened jar of cacao bliss, kamut ditalini (yeah, I didn't know what it was either; it is "short, tubular pasta made from 100 percent organically grown, whole grain Khorasan (kamut®). This versatile pasta means 'little thimbles' in Italian"), cucumber melon body lotion, a cookie tin with a jaunty snowman on it, a Hello Kitty clock, 2 Tupperware juice containers without lids, a white house-dress with pastel-colored flowers on it.
When I went backpacking as a kid, my parents understood that part of this time out from our regular life should include foods we didn't encounter at home. Often, these foods were used as incentive: "Make it to the top of that rise and we'll stop for some Cracker Barrel cheese/Cadbury chocolate/smoked oysters and sardines." What I loved about these foods was that they were for the pleasure of taste. They were not meant as something to fill up on, but something to savor.
Kool-Aid also made an appearance. We'd pack in our own sugar and two or three packets festooned with that cheery, rotund pitcher in purple or pinks tones. At lunchtime, it was someone's job to mix the sugar and Kool-Aid with river water, finding just the right spot in the river to get moving water, deep enough to be good, but not so deep that you had to reach out so far that you risked irretrievably dropping the bottle. One trip, when I was nine, it was my turn. We were hiking in the Adirondacks. It was a sunny day, not hot exactly, but the sort of sun you felt when you were hiking. The terrain, especially near the water, included these massive stretches of flattish stone. Where we stopped for lunch, these flat slabs led right up to the river and dropped down, forming a waterfall. I had to scootch out to the water on my belly. I'd already poured the Kool-Aid and sugar into the special narrow-necked camping bottle - not conveniently wide-mouthed like Tupperware would have been. Now I used one arm to help me scootch and the other held the bottle. I remember wondering if my parents were having a lapse in judgment, letting me get water from a river that it wasn't safe to approach on foot. The sun beat on the rocks. I was warm where I touched them, warm on my back where the sun found me. As I reached the water, the stone fell away gradually. It was hard to get the bottle in deep enough to submerge it without going out farther than I was strictly comfortable with. The water was achingly cold. I scootched some more, deeply aware of how much I didn't want to drop the bottle. Finally, if I dipped the bottle on its side nearly horizontally, enough water sprang up from the river and into the bottle that, with some patience, it would fill.
This is not a story of how I dropped the bottle and watched it and its purple contents fly over a lip of stone down a waterfall.
This is a story of how good strawberry Kool-Aid tastes when you've arrived at it after some effort, effort that involved doing something you weren't sure you could do.
This is also a love letter to my parents.
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