I love camping in the late autumn and winter because the crowds are down, the land looks healthy from periodic rains, and there are plenty of critters out foraging and exploring.
Sometimes a passing front comes through, and we hunker down to wait out the rain. That is unless I’m fishing, because fishing can be good in the rain.
So, what is there to do in a tent or camping vehicle while waiting out the rain? There are the usual pastimes like sharpening knives, cleaning things, reading and writing. Storytelling is always a favorite thing to do, but sometimes a group game is the best thing.
During one such campsite rainstorm, someone had a big bag of M&Ms, and we all appreciated her for it because they are yummy.
I teased the group telling them that before we could eat them we had to put the M&Ms all in alphabetic order. That brought a chuckle around the circle, but then I turned an M&M upside down and suddenly we had Ws as well as Ms.
Someone turned one sideways and we had an E. Turned around the other way and we had a 3, which messed up the alphabet, so we ignored it.
I had just finished sharpening my pocket knife, so I fished it out of my pocket and began creatively carving up M&Ms. Mostly I had a pile of tasty rubble, but I did manage to create Ns and Vs and Is and As (the A was missing a crossbar, but I allowed it).
With everyone’s creativity, we had a variety of consonants and vowels. We now had letters M, W, E, N, V, A and I. It struck me that was enough for a sparse but challenging game of Scrabble. My eyebrow went up (it does that on its own, I swear) and I wiped off the fish fillet board and put it down in the middle of the circle of campers.
Soon we had rows and columns of words like new, men, view, name, nim (is that one even fair?). mime, mine, wine, vine, in, win, wane, maw, Anna, wave, anew …
The list went on, and the usual arguments came up about what words were allowable and which were not. Dictionaries are available on cell phones these days, so there was an authority in the tent.
The rainy weather front passed after a couple of hours, and we got out of the tent to tend to the campsite and hang things up to dry in the post-frontal wind.
That game of M&M Scrabble remained the topic of conversation for the rest of the day, or at least until we got hungry and ran out of M&Ms.
