Kitchen Table Wisdom

Every April, something in me stirs. Maybe it’s the lengthening light or the softening ground, but this year it’s the calendar that caught my attention. The first day of trout season falls on the first weekend of April, and suddenly I’m back in the late 1960s, climbing into my parents’ pickup truck camper and heading for Hyner Run.

We went every year—the first weekend of trout season, no matter the weather. Before the State Park had campsites, we simply found a wide patch along the road and claimed it as ours. Some years were warm, some cold, and some managed to be both. We camped through rain, snow, sleet, and sunshine. The weather never paused the tradition. This was our rhythm, our gathering, our way of being together.

I remember the years when Easter weekend and trout season landed on the same dates. Even then, we packed up the camper and went. On Friday evening we’d make camp, and early the next morning my mom and dad would build a fire for bacon and eggs before we walked to the stream. Mom stayed behind, tending her cast iron tripod and kettle, making her ham and bean soup—the kind that warmed you from the inside out. If we were lucky, she had baked that week, and there would be fresh bread or homemade rolls waiting for us at lunchtime.

By midday, our campsite became a small village. Uncles, cousins, neighbors, friends—they all knew where to find us. Even the occasional stranger who stopped by for a chat was offered a bowl of soup. Looking back, I realize it wasn’t just the food that drew people. It was the welcome. It was the open fire, the open hands, the open table. It was the way my mother made room for whoever happened to wander by.

We weren’t a “church every Sunday” family. Easter didn’t always find us in a sanctuary; sometimes it found us beside a stream, warming our hands by a fire. But even there, something holy was happening. Long before I had words like faith or grace, something was quietly forming in me. John Wesley would call it prevenient grace—the grace that goes before us, shaping us through the ordinary moments of our lives. I didn’t learn faith from a pulpit. I learned it from the way my parents welcomed people, from the way my mother shared whatever she had, from the way our campsite became a place of belonging. Before I ever chose the church, grace had chosen me.

Those weekends taught me something long before I had words for it: hospitality isn’t about entertaining—it’s about belonging.

It’s about sharing what you have, even if what you have is simple. It’s about creating a space where people feel warmed, fed, and seen.

Years later, when I first read the stories in Acts about people holding things in common and caring for one another, I recognized the spirit of it. Not because we were trying to live out scripture, but because something in those gatherings by the stream already carried that same quiet generosity.

So, when April rolls around—with its trout streams, its thawing earth, its promise of new beginnings—I find myself returning to those early lessons. The ones learned not in a classroom or a sanctuary, but around a fire, beside a mountain stream, with a bowl of soup in my hands.

Sometimes the wisdom that shapes us doesn’t come from grand moments. Sometimes it comes from the ordinary places where love is shared freely and without fuss.

Sometimes it comes from a campsite that felt, in its own way, like home.

Cathy D.