InnerTeub

Oh, you guys. I’m so sad about something and I really doubt my ability to express to you in exactly the way I want.

Have I mentioned I went to camp as a kid? I did. It was a seven week all girls camp in Southern Maine. It was 110 girls, ages 9-16, and I went there for seven years (plus one year as a counselor when I was in college.) Growing up in Minnesota, I suppose it seemed a little random to everyone around me that I would go away to a camp in Maine for seven weeks, but it was far from: my mom and her sisters attended the same camp growing up, my uncles and my brothers attended the boy-version of that camp in the next town over; it was a family affair. And while Maine is FAR from Minnesota, going back every year, for as long as I did, meant I was seeing the same girls year after year; they were my friends, closer than many of the friends I had in MN, and I still keep in touch with many of them today.

I can’t quite express what a gift it was to be able to attend this camp year after year, but that is exactly what it was: a gift. For seven weeks every year I got to leave my home and go be myself with my friends; I wasn’t a little sister or the youngest child, I was just me, back for another summer of friends and horses and campfires and singing and sunsets. There was no electricity or technology; I learned the art going to bed when it was dark and writing letters in order to have some contact with the outside world. I ran back to camp after my freshmen year in college and spent a glorious seven weeks working my butt off as a counselor (don’t think working at a camp is hard work? Try living with six 11 year olds for seven weeks with no break) and was able to reset myself after a frantic first year of living on my own.

In many ways I consider this camp to be another version of home, and every summer as “camp season” starts up, I get a pang of sadness that I don’t get to go back, even though it’s been ten years since I’ve been there.

The director of the camp was a woman named June; she was a counselor there when my mom and aunts were campers in the 50s, and she was still there when I showed up as an awkward ten year old. She lived at the camp year round and dedicated her life to keeping the summer experience the same for every girl who showed up, and she treated us like family. One of my most vivid memories of June is seeing her showing up at the last minute to my aunt’s funeral in the fall of 1999. She hadn’t seen my aunt since the 50s, but she knew my aunt’s daughter (my cousin, who also attended camp), and me, and my mom, and even though the east coast was getting pummeled by hurricanes that September weekend, she hiked it from Maine to New York to be with us.

June died this past week, which shouldn’t be as surprising as it is; after all, she was “old” when I was there as a teenager– and it’s been quite a while since I was a teenager. But she was such a presence,, and so constant, it has caught me completely off guard to know that she is gone. I heard she had passed yesterday at the end of the work day, and found myself sitting in my office in suburbia, as far as a person can be from the shores of a lake in Maine – perhaps as far as I’ve ever been from the person who grow up on those shores – crying my eyes out.

So. I’m sad.  Something that is so important to me has changed, and I’m sadfor that, and I’m sad for how long its been since I’ve really connected with that place and that person. Thank you, June Gray, for taking me in as an awkward pre-teen kid, and making me always feel that I was absolutely perfect, just as I was. Thank you for giving me a place where it was completely normal to sing our hearts out after breakfast, hold hands while watching a sunset, and run around like a damned fool. Perhaps the best way I can describe what you built for us is to share that just yesterday I caught up with an old camp friend, and we found ourselves excitedly talking about sending our future daughters up to Wawenock, giving them the gift of the home you gave us.