When life gives you sticks – Picture of the Day

We have a sticky backyard. I’m not sure how our trees are not naked there are so many sticks on the ground. (I wonder the same thing about Alexander’s kitties – there is so much fuzz around his house how are they not naked?)_

I can usually gather up an armload about a foot in diameter every time before I mow. With No-mow May happening (a reason for laziness! Wooohoooo) I gathered no sticks until yesterday (I figured since a week of June has happened, I should get on with the mowing…pretty soon). I suggested we have a fire to burn them up – because that is easier than wrangling them into the car to take them to the yard waste place AND because we had marshmallows.

While we were remodeling bathrooms during the pandemic so were some friends of ours. We wondered together how we had never run into each other at Menards, since we felt like we were there daily (well, Keith was there – I was hiding from germs at home – but you get the idea). When we were at Menards buying the deck boards, we ran into them. It was fabulous. We chatted away near the food section, which prompted shopping on my part. I picked out Sprecher root beer and Keith picked out diced beets and chocolate filled marshmallows. He has been gobbling his beets (I have NOT been gobbling his beets), but I made him wait to try the marshmallows until we had a fire.

So, we had a fire. We burned up soooooo many sticks. I gathered and Keith fired. We had the most fabulous embers to roast our marshmallows. The toasted chocolate filled marshmallows had a thicker outer shell (that’s really not a good description, but go with me), then a nice amount of chocolate inside. They were a little bigger than regular marshmallows, but there were only 12 in the bag. I consider that perfect, because we ate them all up (Some person ate 4, which was really too many. Some other person ate the rest). We aren’t frequent fire havers, so having a partial bag of marshmallows left is not great. This was just right.