The smoky, crackling campfire burns with a maniacal tranquility. The kind of ferocity that seeps into one’s bones. The fragrance of camping, with Grandma Marilyn. No rain, but sitting in front of a blazing fire is enough. It’s overwhelming; the pungent odor drenches through my thick blue jeans, coffee-colored sweat jacket, frizzy, knotted hair, and sticky skin as if standing under a waterfall of leaves, burning wood, pine needles and Grandma’s plaid sweaters. Grandma Marilyn looks at me and smiles with glad eyes, content to spend time with her youngest granddaughter.

A remembrance of sorts. Great Grandma Thomas beaming at me, sitting across from me on a sterile bed. Sliding on some tiny pale slippers, she pulls her fragile body up bit by bit into a wheelchair to greet her guests. Three generations of the Thomas-Lumbert family, all in one room, all of one gender.

Poetry.

My other great-grandma. A year and a half later, my mom receives Great Grandma Lumbert’s will in the mail. She sobs for days. My mom was disowned by the grandma that loved her with a full heart.

Drama.

Anger floods my being. The will was rewritten after Great Grandma Lumbert lost her son, signed by the shell of an old woman whose mind was not in the right place. An old woman who had mood swings, dementia, and bipolar behaviors. The will should not have been valid.

Soul drifts into body, and I’m sitting in front of a campfire again. Think of something positive. A memory that brings a grin to my lips.

The huge in-ground swimming pool from my childhood home. My mom had a tradition we called, “Pickles in the pool.” We would literally swim and talk and eat pickles in the pool together. I liked to sip the pickle juice in a small cup. The pool had a shallow end and a deep end. So did my stomach.

Positive thoughts, positive thoughts. Okay.

Build-A-Bear Workshop. Choir. Sweet baby puppy Jayden—the only man in our lives.

Great Grandma Thomas again. Her lovely face, bubbly high voice. Lines like the thin jagged trails of a canyon seen from a hawk soaring above. Soft as silk…no, soft as one would imagine the texture of a cloud. Aged forehead and cheeks, speckled with peach fuzz and liver spots. A bubbly smile in the voice and eyes. “Weathered faces lined in pain are soothed beneath the artists loving hand”…Don McLean. A song we sang in choir.

My mind wanders back to the present. Eyes watery, they close and my head turns away. The smoke clouds and fogs up my vision. I scoot my chair through the sandy, dust-like dirt to my right. Just a foot or two. To get away. To forget the feeling that scorches my pupils and irises and the whites of my eyes. To forget the crushing odor of camping that brings back too many beautiful and painful memories. They are the moments from my recollection, flashing just under the surface, portraying the female lineage up to three generations before me. I can’t see past the tears in my eyes, morphing and obscuring my vision into one of insanity and depression.

“Hold your horses,” Mom would say, “Settle down.” As if we all had the time to do that.