Are you a camp person?

I love this article about camp and what your feelings toward it say about you. My experience in summer camp was strikingly similar to the author's. I remember using our daily rest time (my favorite camp activity) to write letters to my parents detailing the many ways I was suffering. The three weeks I was away felt like three decades or three generations maybe--each one containing its own unique personal battles that I fought bravely.

Week one was dedicated to meeting new people...also to sleeping, showering, eating, sailing, horseback riding, and eating ice cream out of a huge trough with no utensils with said new people. For someone who needs their alone time, all this togetherness made me feel starved for my bedroom at home where I could sit for hours with a book with no one but my stuffed animals to talk to.

Week two was devoted to cultivating a best friend relationship with one specific girl from my cabin. This girl was usually a trusted confidante who was even more uncomfortable in the camp world than I was. We would discuss how the camp soap was giving her eczema or how she thought we should all be wearing helmets while playing field hockey. If anyone was having a worse time at camp than I was, it was my camp best friend.

Week three was all about getting annoyed with my camp best friend and realizing that her own neuroses were really getting in the way of my becoming a better water skier.

The last day of camp was Parents' Day, and to me, it was the whole reason camp existed in the first place. This deprivation of the things one took for granted in their everyday life--things like parents, watching TV by yourself, taking a shower without wearing a bathing suit--made normal life transcend its normal life-ness. When I saw my parent's station wagon pull into the gravel parking lot on the last day of camp, I practically ran to them with my arms open like Laura Ingalls Wilder running to Pa in the opening credits of Little House on the Prairie. Surely, my parents thought camp had paid for itself in that brief, shining moment of utter devotion to them.

I remember one parents' day in particular...I was doing a twirl routine to the theme song from Beverly Hills Cop. As I twirled and flipped the baton expertly, I imagined that my parents were thinking, "who is this master of the baton and what has she done with our daughter?" Did I look different to them? Sure there were the superficial changes: the leaner, stronger physique--a pleasant bi-product of all the never-ending activity we were forced to do. I was tanner and had smooth legs (everyone shaves their legs at camp). But surely they could see beyond the cosmetic stuff and see that I was tougher in some way, perhaps a tad more mature? While I had not necessarily thrived at summer camp, I had survived. And I was stronger for it.

While my own feelings about camp are complicated, I would definitely encourage my own children to go. I have a feeling they will be more successful campers than I, but even if they aren't, parents' day will be awesome.

Happy 4th of July! And happy camp to all!

Summer Word Picture

Yesterday we made our weekly visit to the farm to pick up our CSA box. Great Country Farms is located in Bluemont, Va, a beautfiul town that sits on the edge of the Blue Ridge Mountains. Being members of the CSA means that we get a box of produce each week and we get to pick our own produce too. Yesterday, was an exceptionally perfect day, weather-wise. For some people, it might've been a little warm, but for a Texan like me, 85 degrees and sunny is about as good as it gets in June.


As we were walking across a gravel road to the section of the farm dedicated to cherry trees, grapevines and raspberry bushes, we passed under a wooden awning that marks the entrance to the farm. As you're walking along the path, the A-shaped awning creates a frame around a stunning view of rolling hills, with a patchwork of crops growing on the steep slant of the hillside. It looks as though someone went to the top of a small mountain and shook out a big quilt, so that it covers all the foothills below. I told Emma that I had forgotten my camera, so she needed to take a picture of this scene with her imagination's camera and paint it later when we got home. She got really excited by that idea and told me that she was going to need lots of black and red paint so that she could paint the black raspberries we were about to pick. I told her she had a deal.

To get to the black raspberries, you have to pass by the sour cherry trees. If you've ever played the game "Hi Ho Cherry-o," then you can imagine what these cherry trees look like. Cherries really do grow on little stems and dangle down from tree branches just like in the game. Last week we picked the sour cherries and I was surprised by their ripeness, and how they almost disintegrated in my fingers as soon as I picked them. I tried one out just to see the level of sourness we were talking about. Pretty sour. Then I asked another mom who was picking cherries near us if these were indeed the sour cherry trees and not some other deadly, poisonous type of tree masquerading as a cherry tree, and she said they were. She showed me how to hold the low branches down so that my kids could reach up and pick the cherries and put them in their containers. We quickly learned which cherries would burst as soon as we picked them and which ones were firm just by looking at them.


This week we walked past the cherries to the rows of raspberry bushes. It was a long walk, uphill in the bright sun. Last week we were supposed to pick the raspberries, but as we were walking up the hill, past the cherry trees, the sky opened up and we were drenched. Charlie and Teddy were crying as we headed back downhill to the farm for shelter. Emma and I kind of enjoyed the drama of the situation. Ten minutes later we were eating ice cream in the bright sunshine again and wanting to go out and pick raspberries, but, alas, Charlie was no longer in the mood.


Yesterday there was no sign of rain, but there were many signs that Charlie was flagging. I'm wondering if maybe he thought we were climbing up the entire small mountain that lay ahead of us? Sometimes I have to remind myself that kids have very little perception of how far away things are and I think the raspberry bushes just seemed impossibly far to Charlie. We made it eventually, though, and I told Charlie I would wait with him while he rested in the grass. I encouraged Emma to go pick the raspberries without us. She was more than happy to oblige. She is a quick study and soon learned to look for just the right shade of deep, almost black, purple that would signal a sweet, tangy black raspberry. Raspberry bushes have thorns. "Just like roses, Mommy," Emma informed me. When did she learn about roses having thorns? Emma got stuck a few times by the thorns, but didn't cry or complain. Now that she's five-and-a-half, she's learning to put things into perspective. She's figuring out that some things are worth a little pain.

We headed back to the farm and took the hayride out to pick peas next. I am 34 years old and I've never seen English peas in their natural state. I knew they didn't come into this world in Birds Eye packages in the frozen food section, but that was about the extent of my pea knowledge until yesterday. Peas come in just about the cutest packaging you've ever seen in your life. It's a shame the Birds Eye people don't make more of this. They grow on these sweet little vines with curly tendrils spiraling out everywhere. And the pod itself is this beautiful green color, just stuffed with round, cherubic peas. At the top of the pod is a little hat-looking thing that is just too cute for words. No wonder there are so many baby/pea metaphors out there: Pea in the Pod, sweet pea, etc. You can't help but think of a baby all swaddled up with a hat on its head when you look at these adorable little legumes.

It is an understatement to say that the kids had fun picking peas. I'm pretty sure they were some of the most enthusiastic pea-pickers ever. You have to look closely and even lift the pea plant up a little to see the bounty hiding below. The best pea pods seemed to be hiding just out of sight, and you could really only see them if you took the time to look. At one point the kids sat down on the ground in front of a particularly fertile plant and harvested handfuls of pea pods.

Sitting in the dirt among the dainty peas in their sweet pods, the kids were in their element. I wanted to take a picture of it, to somehow preserve the pureness of our moment under the sun and the clouds, our brown bag so full of green peas that we could hardly join the edges together to carry it. It's hard to imagine now, but I know there is a time in our future when my kids' joy will be more complicated. It happened to me...I'm sure it will happen to them too. I wish I had had my camera with me. But sometimes even a camera is not enough to capture what I want to capture.

School's Out for Summer

Summer vacation is becoming less and less a time to hang out by the pool and run around outside unstructured-ly and more and more a time to sign up for various week-long camps: gymnastics camp, soccer camp, nature camp, ballet camp...I saw a flyer for handwriting boot camp just today. I mean, if everyone's just going to be in camps working on their handwriting and pirouettes all summer, then that's not much of a vacation. It sort of makes you wonder why we don't just go to school all year long, doesn't it? That would certainly benefit the multitudes of people who not only enjoy jai alai camp, but require it as a form of childcare when school's not in session.

Here's an article proposing that we have school year-round...I don't know about you, but I'm kind of thinking that more school doesn't necessarily equal smarter kids. Maybe it's just me. I think something's broken with our education system, but it's not necessarily summer vacation that needs fixing. What do you think?