The Vagabond Kitchen: Sleep, Bread, and Brie

Father’s day dinner at the Mills household: grilled venison tenderloin, fresh-herbed rice, and mixed salad with garlicky homemade croutons.

6-24-15

Being a vagabond means sleeping in many places: guest bedrooms, deep woods, decrepit farmhouses. Means plastic bags of dirty clothes. Toilet paper rolls on the dashboard. Damp, bundled tents in the back seat.

Vagabonding means sleeping in many different beds: the rental house, down blankets on the hardwood floor because the bed was in storage. Orson’s dad’s A-frame guest bedroom perched beneath slanted 2nd story eaves. My grandma’s too-short-couch in Armada the night before I left to drop the cat off in Georgia. Dear-friend Alice’s guest bedroom, my last sleeps with sweet Simon kitty until the summer’s vagabonding comes to an end. First night in the home-tent—a cocooned warmth alternate reality blurred by 18 hours on the road—our pull-out couch both familiar and new in the home-tent’s sighing canvas.

My childhood bedroom in Curtis, lake waves licking shoreline in lilac-scented early dawn. AuthorQuest Camp—19th century farmhouse, spineless mattress, ghost boards creaking in the Wolverine night. Back to the home-tent, then back to familiar childhood bedroom, days blurring. The purple and orange Mountain Hardware tent, first shelter of Rachel, Orson, and Gus—sleeping beneath canopied maples on a sandy-floored beach bed miles inland, blankets pebbled with grainy sand particles deposited by a snail-paced glacier thousands of years ago.

Gus and Sneak: Climbing dogs!

My sister’s spare bedroom on 7th street, late-night Vango’s gyros and waffle fries—traffic sounds, not mosquitoes, singing a lullaby as we fell into exhausted sleep, bug bite stings and itches reminders of a good day spent rock climbing.

Chive-flower stir-fry

***
For dinner our second night camping in the Mountain Hardware tent, dirty, elated, hungry, we ate big creamy brie bites on torn baguette wedges topped with tasty soprasetta, dark Kalamata olives, crunchy bites of local carrots. We sipped Bogle Sauvignon Blanc chilled in a spring-fed stream silky with green water weeds flowing in the current like the hair of naiads. The dog attracted swarms of biting bugs, our flip-flopped feet bumped and welted but the twilight was vibrant and we weren’t yet ready to leave it behind.

The evening’s storm clouds dissipated, leaving fresh, lush scents and a cacophony of bird song. Each note reverberated off the rock face—Echo in bird form. An evening choral symphony, urging me to relax. Let go of plans and obligations a day away. Don’t tax your mind in useless contemplations. This beautiful place deserves your attention.
I took another bite, tasting silky brie melting against bread grain answered by salty olive brine. I chewed. Listened.

Rachel Mills in action cooking in her vagabond kitchen.

by Rachel Mills

Rachel Mills is a professor of English at Northern Michigan University where she received her BS in English, MA in Creative Writing, and MFA in Creative Nonfiction. Her current writing focus revolves around looking at food from a universal perspective-- the history, culture, and traditions surrounding both her family's food traditions, and those of other cultures.

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