Campfire

Ronald glared at the sad excuse for a campfire, infuriated with its lack of warmth. He had been trying for nearly an hour to get the fire going, with nothing but a hundred some odd burnt out or broken matches to show for it. He had tried every way he could think of to stack the logs, arrange the kindling, drop the matches. It wasn't even a problem of wind. He just couldn't get the wood to light.

Katrine had been taking a nap, and picked that moment to wake up and crawl out of her tent. She came out with a yawn and, much to Ronald's chagrin, gave a half laugh when she caught sight of him trying once more to start the fire.

"I thought they were supposed to teach you stuff like that when you were a scout?" she asked, mockingly.

Ronald grunted out a response as another match snapped in his fingers as he was trying to light it. "Just because they were supposed to," he shot back angrily, "doesn't mean that they did. All of the people who actually knew how were too busy building the fires to ever teach any of the rest of us how to build them ourselves."

Katrine chuckled and shook her head, taking a seat at the picnic table situated not too far from the fire pit. "Were you not paying attention to them as they were building the fires, then?"

Ronald snapped upright, his frustration at the fire exploding in to full on anger thanks to her comments. "No, usually I wasn't," he spat at her, "because usually I was busy doing cooking or cleaning, or some other such activity that was just as important to what we were doing but considerably less manly, so no one else wanted to do any of it."

Katrine's smug look dropped when she saw how pissed Ronald was. She had always seen him joke about things like this when they talked about camping, but it had never occurred to her that it might have been anything more than that - a joke. But now, actually being out and doing these kinds of things, she saw that there were real emotions behind his words.

And she couldn't deny that he knew what he was doing in other areas while they were camping. He had taken out to the path like it was an old friend, and when they had returned to camp he had been quite capable of making dinner (though she had considered it to be fairly early to eat.) Even now, as she glanced to where they had eaten before she had taken her nap, she could see that all the silverware was clean and set aside. He had done nearly all of it without her help, as she was unfamiliar with the equipment and how precarious and small everything was as compared to how it was back home.

But he was fuming with trying to build a fire, which she had always assumed would be easy. She got up and went to him, gently taking the box of matches from him.

"I can do it," he began to argue, but she cut him off.

"You've been doing everything," she retorted. "Let me help with this."

She leaned down into the pit and started fiddling with the wood, making small adjustments to it here and there. Then she went to the paper bag that had been carrying some of their food supplies and began tearing and crumpling it, before pushing it inside of the logs. Then she set the paper aflame, and carefully guided it all to burn.

Ronald watched in silent frustration as Katrine took care of the fire. It wasn't that he didn't appreciate the help. He certainly didn't think she would do worse than he would at building it. He knew better than that. It was just... He felt like the opportunity was being taken away from him, just like it had been so many times before. How was he ever supposed to learn if no one would let him?

Katrine had the fire going in no time. The two sat around it as the sun set, taking its warmth and its light in comfortable silence. But Ronald still couldn't help but feel like he had lost another chance, and he didn't know when the next one would come.