{"id":2353,"date":"2014-07-28T05:35:10","date_gmt":"2014-07-28T10:35:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/stories.daddytales.com\/?p=2353"},"modified":"2014-07-28T05:35:10","modified_gmt":"2014-07-28T10:35:10","slug":"aunt-helene","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/2014\/07\/28\/aunt-helene\/","title":{"rendered":"Aunt Helene"},"content":{"rendered":"

The boys and I went on a camping trip this past weekend to Forever Florida<\/a>. We had tons of fun ziplining, horseback riding, and hiking. Our campsite was incredibly remote, a 20 minute drive down a dirt road through wilderness and cow pastures, and we were the only campers for miles around.<\/p>\n

I started arranging the cut pieces of wood into my typical campfire configuration.<\/p>\n

“Can we do build it like a tee-pee?” my youngest son asked.<\/p>\n

“Okay.” I took my stack apart and started over.<\/p>\n

“How about like this?” he asked, moving wood around. “We can balance it.”<\/p>\n

“Sure.”<\/p>\n

I was more focused on the small sticks. There was very little tinder available, and it had rained the night before. I was more concerned about just getting something to catch fire than I was about the final shape of the thing.<\/p>\n

Ten minutes later, as I was muttering about wet wood and no tinder and how few matches we’d brought, my oldest son balanced on a log. “I wish Aunt Helene was here.”<\/p>\n

“Were here,” I corrected. “Why?”<\/p>\n

“She can start a fire anywhere!”<\/p>\n

“Yeah,” his little brother chimed in. “She’s legendary.”<\/p>\n

“Even in the rain.”<\/p>\n

“With only one match!”<\/p>\n

“And it’s really quick.”<\/p>\n

“I heard that she even started a fire floating on the – ”<\/p>\n

“Yes,” I interrupted. “You’re right. She’s a legendary fire-starting force of nature. Now shut up.”<\/p>\n

They laughed and continued ruminating about the wondrous fire powers of my sister, and how handy she would be to have on a camping trip, and how surprising it is that she didn’t teach her little brother any of her secrets.<\/p>\n

For the record, I did get the fire started. It ended up being a tee-pee, and I only used one book of matches.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was going to title this one “the legendary fire-starting force of nature,” but I thought it would be too dramatic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[118,122,120,119],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-daddytales-c","category-daddytales-n","category-daddytales-embarassing","category-daddytales-funny"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6DpYi-BX","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2353"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2353\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.pat-matthews.com\/stories\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}