Saturday Evening Moon and Flame

After dinner the larger S. clan (A.'s parents have a house next to the house that her great great grandmother, I may be missing a great, received as a wedding present back in the day, which is still in the family...so a bunch of cousins were right next door) and guests gathered on the shore with outdoors chairs and sweatshirts for a pretty nice bonfire. Wait, first I went out and tried to take beautiful photographs of the orange moon rising to the west, but the camera refused to cooperate. I mean, these photographs may suggest at the pretty, but they do not capture the whole of it.

Here is the fire. H., A.'s sister, and her two friends M. and G. collected the wood and then H. constructed it, teepee-style.

A. developed an E.-like growth...or an E.-like blanket, depending on your perspective. I told them to act like they were happy and cousins with varying degrees of success.
This time it worked out.
This time, not so much. E. was quite taken with this image of herself and insisted I show it to her parents, which I did.
Then I asked E. to take photographs of A. and myself. She took four and these were the best of the bunch. The others, I will burn (except that they're not paper copies, so I'll probably let them rot on my external harddrive until the rapture).

I had a little better luck taking photographs of the moon's reflection on the water. I really liked this a lot.

Then I used one of the dock poles (poles?) to keep the camera relatively steady while I took shots of the beach/fire for 12 second exposures.
Slowly many of the 'grown ups' went to bed, but we continued to sit around the increasingly smaller fire. I am a bit of a fire fixer type. Not that I can fix broken fires but, once they're started, I like to reorganize them, put more logs on, you know, just generally maintain the fire. Perhaps my favorite part was when the evening came to a close and I got to be the person to go right up to the water and fill a bucket with some of the lake and then bring it back and douse the fire...three times! There was such a satisfying hiss and steam, along with the obligatory plumes of smoke. I wish I could maintain and put out fires all the time. That is probably also what a lot of arsonists think to themselves. Huh.

Also, apropos of nothing, yesterday was my mom's birthday. Feel free to wish her a good one a day late:)