It is always fun to receive mail from home and when that mail turns out
to be an unexpected package, the thrill escalates exponentially. Several weeks
ago I received a large box from my brother-in-law in the post. I cut through
the packing tape and cardboard and unwrapped the layers of newsprint to find an
old, green, Coleman camp stove just like the one my parents used for camping
when we were all young. The vintage stove in the box, however, was in pristine
condition as though it had never been used. As I lifted it from its nest of
packing materials I smelled fresh paint. Inside a plastic bag my
brother-in-law had enclosed a copy of the original owners manual, directions for
its use, and a Father’s Day card I had sent to my dad a few years ago thanking
him for taking us camping when we were small.
I loved camping when I was a child; the frenetic race of digging for razor
clams on a sandy shore beside the sea, burned by salt-wind and sunshine; building nests in the dune grass; climbing over huge, crumbling logs in a quiet forest as we explored
fir-scented trails on the side of a mountain and gleaned huckleberries from the
scrub like bear cubs; looking for fairies in the fern fronds; falling asleep in a warm, red flannel-lined sleeping bag
to the allegro lullaby of a river hurrying past our tent; collecting sand
dollars, shells, rocks and pine cones; roasting marshmallows over an open fire
at night; fetching water from a spigot in the ground. All of it was magical to
me, stepping over the boundary of the familiar into a strange new world of child-size adventure.
And central to these memories is the Coleman stove. From hot chocolate
and pancakes for breakfast, with a dented aluminum coffee pot percolating its
perfume through the woods, to baked beans and hot dogs for supper, even the
simplest food cooked and eaten out of doors was transformed into something
special and is inextricably linked in my memory to the smell of camping.
It wasn’t until I was an adult, with children of my own, that I realized
just how much work it all was and developed a new appreciation for my dad.
Included in the package from my brother-in-law was a note:
While I was
organizing Dad’s den I found this [Father's Day] card...and read what you had
written to him. When your brother and I were working in the garage later in the
week we found a well-used Coleman camp stove. I thought it would be a lost
memory to put it into a sale to fetch a few dollars, so I decided to bring it
back to life and to restore it to its original state when your dad brought it
home.
This is a Coleman
425 stove; it was produced in the late 1940’s. It would have cost around $5.00 when
it was new.
My hope is that
this old stove may bring back memories from the camping trips you shared with
your dad.
It did. It is. And now, added to those memories will be the
inexpressible kindness and compassion of my brother-in-law’s gift to me. He
painstakingly dismantled and restored every detail of the old stove even to the
Coleman decal on the lid. It isn’t something I would have thought to keep after
my father died earlier this year, but now it is a treasure and I am looking
forward to taking my grandchildren on a picnic and cooking something memorable
for them.
