I have a confession to make. Though I fear that this admission may lead to the recall of my Dahlstrom Card, for the sake of honesty and the all-important Need To Tell A Story, I make it here with fear and trembling:

I haven’t slept in my tent–or any tent, for that matter–in four years.

I’ve been outside, of course. I’ve trekked in the Dolomites and hiked regularly in the Cascades up until it a few weeks before my daughter was born, but none of my adventures in the last few years have involved sleeping outdoors.

Now, I’m setting the tent up in the living room, trying hard not to poke out any windows or eyes with the poles that stretch from wall to wall. Luci is fascinated and delighted, but I feel more conflicted. You see, I’m setting it up so I can take a picture of it, a photo that I’ll post in our community online flea market as I try to sell my precious tent. I try to feel like Jo March in Little Women, selling her hair to purchase train fare for her mother to visit their father, wounded in the Civil War, but I’m unable to avoid a sense of betrayal. My tent, which I’ve set up in a castle, which has visited the beaches of Normandy, may soon belong to someone else.

The truth is, I had actually thought this particular tent was lost until a few weeks ago, when Timmy discovered it lurking behind a suitcase in the rafters of our attic. Dusty but essentially the same reliable, simple tent is has always been, it seems to beg for more excursions. Why, it seems to inquire, has it been so very long? Yet its discovery led us to a trying and oft-repeated conundrum: Do we bring it with us?

Europe being a place of cheap, comfortable mountain huts, I’m not actually sure why it ended up here in the first place. I imagine that on some trip back to Germany, I had space in a suitcase and just knew that I was a Tent Person, and therefore must have a tent, easily accessible, wherever I lived. And I’ve used the tent a bit, though not nearly as much as I probably expected. There are, after all, the huts.

The tent takes up most of the living room when I set it up. I unzip the door and Luci walks in, amazed. To her, this tent she’s never seen is as marvelous as any cathedral. She actually gasps once she’s inside, peering out through the mesh windows and sliding her little feet around on the blue floor.

“Can you read me a story in this tent?” she asks, producing a book as if by magic.

“Yes, I can read you a story.” What are tents for, after all, if not for stories? I crawl in beside her, and begin to read Miss Rumphius for the hundredth time. I know it well enough that my mind isn’t on the story as I read, but rather wanders back to the last time I slept in the tent, almost four years ago, a time that made dragging the tent from one continent to another more than worthwhile.

After the wedding of one of our small group girls, a recent graduate, my former (and last) roommate Emily and I spent three days camping in Montreaux, Switzerland. Our campsite was a large lawn on the shore of Lake Geneva, three kilometers from town, and we were camping because Switzerland–at least that part of Switzerland–is just too expensive to sleep in. So we were camping, at the end of my first four years at BFA, just a few days before Emily was moving back to Minnesota. It was trip for celebrating friendship, and four good years. She would soon move home, and I would come back to a school pared down of many of my closest friends and the students in whom I’d invested the most. It was a trip to say goodbye.

I’ll never forget our last evening in Montreaux, sitting by the lake and taking picture after picture of the most breathtaking sunset either of us had ever seen. After a while we stopped talking about it, stopped talking at all, basking in the rose gold splendor splashed on the water and sky. There were tears in that sunset, both of gratitude for the good years that we’d shared, and sadness for the end of this season. When the sun was really gone, a navy sky billowing in its place, one of us–I can’t remember now who–said:

“The thing is, there’s always another sunset. Even though this is the best one we’ve ever seen, there will be more.”

And it was true then. For me there were four years of marriage, a baby and now another. She returned to new friendships and jobs, and built a new home. Later this summer, I’ll go to her wedding, a whole new sunset. We haven’t yet seen the best God has to show us.

Luci and I finish the story, and I take the tent down. She doesn’t want me to, and I don’t really want to, either, but since it takes up the whole living room it really can’t stay here much longer. As I roll it up, remember all the other times I’ve carefully folded and stowed it in its bag, I realize that this tent belongs to another sunset. That sunset, four years ago. Later, I’ll joke with Timmy that I have a five-year plan for tent purchases.

We’ll need a four-person tent within the next two years, I tell him, seeing in my eager daughter a future camper, and vowing that this next child will get on board, too. We will go camping together; it’s just what families do. Then, in five years, we can get another two-person tent, a lighter one for when we’re able to go backpacking again as a couple. This was just my first tent; it won’t be the last.

Long after the tent is put away, when I’ve begun to make dinner, Luci wanders into the kitchen. “That tent was good,” she tells me, a weighty declaration of approval.

And looking at her, her hour-old love of tents, it’s not the past camping trips I see, marvelous as they were, but the ones still to come, in a bigger tent, in a new place.

“It really was, Lu. It was a good tent.”