Green bacon on a stick

Breakfast always tasted better outside, my mother told me years ago as we carried the fixings for a bacon-and-egg breakfast down the steep hillside to the waterfront at Queen Lake, where we visited our cousins Edie and Bill each summer.

Of course she was right, but I don’t know if I would have immediately realized it if she hadn’t told me that day.

Edie was my mother’s cousin, but as close as a big sister to her, and Bill and my father became fast friends. We kids were crazy about our older cousins, and our times at the camp, as we called their rustic house on the lake, were some of the happiest and carefree of my childhood.

Bill loved to regale us with stories – of coming face to face with a Grizzly Bear while hunting in Alaska or hauling telephone poles to hilltops in rural Vermont. But he was a kidder, and when we were young it was sometimes hard to tell where the real story ended and the tall tale began.

At that first lakeside breakfast he told us about cooking over a campfire out in the wilderness. His voice started booming as he described boiling eggs in a pot of coffee and cooking bacon over the fire on a green stick.

Somehow, in the conversation that followed, the green was transposed from the stick to the bacon.

This was long before I was allowed to have coffee, but for some reason the concept of cooking eggs in the coffee really appealed to me, perhaps because it sounded both elemental and efficient. My mother, who loved her coffee, declared that it would ruin the brew, but that nothing would be worse than green bacon on a stick.

Bill was delighted with the concept, and, for all the years we enjoyed breakfast down by the water, he never failed to ask if anyone wanted green bacon on a stick.