Backyard Camping

A great essay in yesterday's Washington Post:

It's unlikely that ours was the first tent pitched here. The hill where our neighborhood sits was once an encampment for Civil War soldiers who rested and spied on the enemy. Their artifacts, entombed in hard Virginia clay, still turn up if you dig deep enough. On this night, we saw the blinking signals of the Washington Monument and a carpet of city lights through the trees. I tried to imagine what they must have seen, framed by pure, brilliant starlight. A black squirrel, a descendant of Canadian immigrants, scolded us from its perch.