Summer Camp

In the summer of 1993, I packed my trunk for the first of many seasons at a sleepaway camp in the Adirondack Mountains of Upstate New York. For seven weeks, I would live in a tent with a counselor and three other girls my age, as a little family unit. Our tent was called Blue Herons, and I don’t remember too much about the first day, just that I was excited to live out my destiny - nearly all of my aunts and uncles on my mom’s side of the family had gone as campers and some even came back to work as counselors. I remember hoping I wouldn’t get homesick, that I had to love it, because it was a rite of passage. Even though you could be a camper at age 7, we had to wait until we were 10 in my family. I had lived vicariously through my older sister’s stories and photos, and it was finally my turn.

What followed was a decade of summers spent Upstate in the mountains, living out of a two-week supply of clothes neatly folded in a trunk that slid under my cot. Years of memories with friends as we adventured in the wilderness. Lessons learned, letters written, mountains climbed, and scars - both emotional and physical, that remain with me to this day.