The campfire had been my mother’s idea. She and my dad moved to North Carolina from my childhood home in New York five months before Hurricane Helene to help my husband and I raise our girls. And, it turned out, to help us through a hurricane the likes of which the mountains of North Carolina had never seen. Just when life started to feel normal again, my mother called.

“We need to start working on care packages for our neighbors. We can bake bread. Divide up all this food we brought back. Make a flyer inviting them to a campfire to burn up some of this brush.”

Who can resist the missionary zeal of a Baptist lady?