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Green Tent

Remember the big boxes you used to play with when you were little? You’d cut windows and doors into them, and they’d be the most prized toy in your room until the box finally collapsed?

Paul took his big box and made an outhouse out of it. You can take the boy out of the Ozarks, but you can’t take the Ozarks out of the boy.

Sage and Todd are playing online backgammon.

Sage What are you listening to?

Todd The mix tape I made you.
Todd Rhapsody playlist, I mean.
Todd I’m so old.
Todd I hated it when my mom would do stuff like that.

Sage Like what?

Todd I’d bring home CDs and she’d say “I see you bought a bunch of tapes” or somesuch. They’re CDs, dammit. And now I do it.

Sage Paul supplies words when I can’t think of them. He does it in this hilarious “Oh Mama, I wish you weren’t 100 years old and senile,” kind of way.

In 1976, a green tent was born in Cumberland, Maryland at the green tent factory. It was a small, two-person tent and it went unnoticed at the Baltimore K-Mart #9 for a long time. But one day, a young father picked it up and took it home.

Soon afterwards, the tent travelled all the way from Baltimore to Southern California, keeping the father and his five year old daughter warm and dry at night during their move across the United States.

After that, the tent went on camping trips at least twice a year, with the father and his daughter. Sometimes the daughter put the tent up in the back yard and slept in it for a night or two.

When the daughter grew up, the father sent the tent with her on her way to college. So the tent was able to shelter the daughter and her road trip companion from the elements all the way from California to the Ozarks.

The tent was glad to arrive in the Ozarks, where it was pitched for years at a time, and it was able to enjoy the woods and the animals who shuffled into it when the weather was especially hard. But eventually even the fine Cumberland, Maryland tent makers were outdone by the rain, and the tent developed so many leaks that the tent was taken down and the pieces put into a shed.

The tent slept deeply, expecting that it would be in the shed forever and always. But one day, in the middle of a dream, the tent was woken up by a woman fussing around in the shed, muttering, “Tent pegs. Tent pegs…where are you?” And suddenly, the green tent was pressed into service again, to serve as the stakes for a tipi that the woman had just finished putting up.

And just as the tent settled happily into its new job, it heard the daughter say, “I bet this tent had absolutely no idea what an exciting life it was going to have when it was first put on the shelf twenty seven years ago.”