On a Saturday evening in mid-October, when the light goes soft over the meadow and the pond behind the Trumbull Nature & Arts Center turns the color of the sky, a small crowd will drag lawn chairs across the grass and settle in around a fire. There will be marshmallows on sticks, graham crackers and chocolate, and there will be stories — told by Mark Ceneri, the center's lead environmental educator.
The event is called S'mores and Storytelling Around the Campfire, and it runs from 6 to 7 p.m. on Oct. 17, 2026. Admission is $20 per family. The instructions are simple and worth following: bring a lawn chair, bring a blanket, and come prepared to sit still for an hour while someone talks and the fire does its work.
It is a modest thing — an hour, a fire, a handful of families — and that is precisely the point. The Trumbull Nature & Arts Center is not a big-budget attraction. It is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit on a patch of meadow, forest, stream and pond, with trails for exploring and a playground that local families treat as a default afternoon destination. The grounds and playground are open dawn to dusk, year-round; the building opens when there is a program inside it. The center's stated mission is to provide "nature-rich experiences to all members of our community," and an evening of storytelling by firelight is about as literal an expression of that as you can get.
The storytelling itself is not an afterthought bolted onto a marshmallow roast. In October 2022, the center ran a program called Native American Storytelling & Other Folk Tales, also led by Ceneri, in which families gathered to hear generations-old folklore — stories like "How the butterflies came to be" and "The woman who married a frog." That event's own listing carried a telling caveat: if a fire ban then in effect was lifted, the group would make s'mores by a campfire; if the ban held, they would make a craft to take home instead. The fire, in other words, has always been the thing everyone was hoping for. This year's October event assumes it.
Ceneri's role at the center goes well beyond the campfire. He is the lead environmental educator and a central figure in the center's push to make environmental science hands-on. In 2023, the center launched a science adventure trail program, with stations along the trails where families could unlock the power of wind, identify animal tracks, learn how to tell a tree's age, test water temperature, and build a bird's nest. Ceneri worked with student docents at those stations. The center's director, Sheryl Baumann, described the philosophy behind it plainly: "We can say conserve water, don't idle your car engine. But that's just talk. This is doing. They will see phenomena for themselves." The same instinct runs through the storytelling nights. A story told by a fire beside a pond teaches something that a worksheet cannot.
The center has been growing. In 2021 it received a two-year grant from the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development's Office of the Arts — $75,000 per year for fiscal years 2021-22 and 2022-23 — which Baumann said would let the center do things it had been hoping to do but couldn't afford. A significant share went toward rehabilitating the meadow, which Baumann called "one of our most important assets" and which had been overrun by non-native and invasive species. The money also replaced the fence around the sunflower garden, power-washed the building, and overhauled the center's monarch way station and pollinator pathway, including an interpretive garden meant to teach visitors best gardening practices. The Patrons of the Trumbull Nature & Arts Center, the nonprofit that provides programming and fundraising support, has earned a Guidestar/Candid Platinum Seal of Transparency.
What the center does across a year is a good measure of its character. There is an annual maple sugaring demonstration. There is a sunflower seed harvest. There are E-STEM field trips and in-school visits serving thousands of students a year, including students from underserved communities, and collaborations with the Trumbull Library, the Trumbull Historical Society, Trumbull Community Women, the Long Hill Garden Club, and local Boy and Girl Scout troops. Corporate volunteers come out for one-day and longer-term projects. It is the kind of institution that runs on a mix of grants, donations, and people showing up.
And then, once a year in October, it runs on marshmallows.
There is something worth noticing about the timing. By mid-October in Connecticut, the summer calendar has emptied out. The town's summer concerts at the gazebo are over, the farmers' market at Twin Brooks Park has closed for the season, and the evenings have turned cool enough that sitting outside requires intention — a chair, a blanket, a reason. The campfire gives the reason. For one hour, the center asks families to do the thing that has become genuinely difficult: be outside together, in the dark, with nothing to look at but a fire and nothing to listen to but a voice.
The event is designed for families, and the logistics are forgiving. It is one hour, not an evening. It is $20 for the family, not per person. It is on a Saturday, at the end of the day, at a place most Trumbull residents already know how to find — just up Main Street, past the playground, where the meadow opens up. You bring the chair and the blanket; the center brings the fire, the stories, and the marshmallows.
Anyone who has been to a campfire program at a nature center knows the shape of the hour. It starts loud, with kids jockeying for the best roasting position and marshmallows catching fire and getting waved around. Then, gradually, it quiets. The fire settles. The storyteller has the group. And for a little while, a patch of meadow in Trumbull becomes the faraway place the story is set in.
That is the whole offer, and it is a good one. S'mores and Storytelling Around the Campfire runs 6 to 7 p.m. on Saturday, Oct. 17, 2026, at the Trumbull Nature & Arts Center, 7115 Main Street, Trumbull, CT 06611. Admission is $20 per family. Pack the lawn chairs and the cozy blankets.