Recollections on this Glistening Morning

The morning is wet after a brief, but heavy, rain last night. The middle-of-the-night downpour woke me up with a flood of memories of being in the rain with Chip. Now, sitting on our deck surrounded by damp outdoor seating and the shiny, wet deck surface, I am reminded of all the camping/glamping experiences I had with Chip.

Oh, how many nights in tents we spent after an entire day (and well into the night) of listening to favorite as well as new bands! How many mornings we emerged from our tent after it had rained overnight to find our coolers, chairs, camping tables and awning dripping with fresh rain paired with morning dew. Those were some of the most beautiful, peaceful mornings I spent with Chip.

Over the years when Chip was healthy, going to festivals was one of the things we really loved to do together. We spent 4-day weekends at the Lockn’ Festival at the Oak Ridge estate in Arrington, VA and the Firefly Festival at The Woodlands in Dover, DE. We saw some of his/my/our favorite bands: The Killers, Tedeschi Trucks, Cage the Elephant, Bastille, The Revivalists, Tom Petty, Andrew McMahon in the Wilderness, Willie Nelson, Lettuce, Matt & Kim, The String Cheese Incident, Umphrey’s McGee, AWOLNATION…just to name a few. We also frequented Saturday-Sunday “festivals” such as The Rooster Walk in Axton, VA, and even took Stella and Sam with us one year to that festival. There, we saw favorites such as The Revivalists, Turquaz and The Motet.

As the side effects of Chip’s cancer treatments took a bigger and bigger toll on his body, he could no longer handle packing up the truck, setting up and manning a campsite (even with my help), spending all day in the hot sun and all night in a tent with bathrooms hundreds of yards away. He could no longer handle the rigors of camping festival life. It bothered him so much that we could no longer attend camping festivals since he knew how the experiences pleased both of us.

In the years since our last camping festival together, we went to plenty of single- or two-day festivals, including Hot August Music festival in Cockeysville, MD and David Shaw’s Big River Get Down near Cincinnati, OH (David Shaw, the lead singer of The Revivalists, puts the festival on each fall in his hometown of Hamilton, OH). Despite not being able to camp/glamp, we both recognized that each minute spent listening to our favorite bands was a blessing and that however it needed to happen, we would make it happen. To be sure, the hotel or close-to-home experiences associated with the non-camping festivals wasn’t a negative, it was just what it was when dealing with life with cancer.

I am so grateful for this glistening morning and all the memories it brought along with it.