Hearts Open as the Sky

My girl (that's the top of her head, second from right, with her fingers in a V) hiked the Appalachian Trail with some of her fellow campers during the first week of August, then went white water rafting at the end of it. She was stoked! "I want to do that all the time when I grow up!" she told me, her words rushing against each other in that punctuated teenage way.

In short, her hike trip was magical, despite freezing nighttime temperatures and drenching rain. But even the elements couldn't douse the excitement of spending day after day with her friends under the open sky, collecting new experiences around each corner, bonding afresh on arrival at each mossy rock, thickly wooded path or pine covered hill. And she and a boy she liked talked their hearts out until way into the nights, huddled in their sleeping bags under a wide blue tarp. Does it get any better when you're 15?

On a high mountain in Maine, six of my daughter's hiking crew made this photographic homage to the week. Their hands spell out "PV Love." The initials stand for Pioneer Village, the name of their camp's home base by a lake in the woods. The love, of course, needs no explanation.

Nature Girls

Two weekends ago, we spent the day in the woods with our son and daughter during their camp's visiting day. Soon after we arrived, I was in my daughter's tent (see photo above), watching her to sort her rather mud-caked laundry so that she could run it down a rocky wooded hillside to the unit director before we left the camp to resupply at Walmart and have lunch in the nearest town.

Outside, I heard one of the girls in her unit sing out, "Hey, a snake!" She was standing a few feet from my daughter's tent, next to a stand of trees roughly equidistant from several other girls' tents. In the next moment, five or six girls, including my daughter jumped from the raised wooden platforms of their tents and raced over to see the snake, which was burrowing into a hole that had previously been disguised by fallen leaves. They oohed and ahhhed and one of them even picked up the poor thing, so that it curled around her fist and forearm as the others yelled at her to let it go, and not a single one of them was afraid.

They didn't seem the slightest bit worried about a snake mere feet away from where they rested their heads at night. It was all just another day in the woods for them.

My husband explained to me that the snakes in this region are not poisonous, so the girls had nothing to fear. They obviously knew that already. Still, I was thoroughly impressed by them.

Into the Woods

My children have been at sleepaway camp for the past three weeks, my daughter as a camper, my son as a counselor. This is the same camp my son has attended for the past six years, and worked at as a counselor assistant last summer. But it is my daughter's first time there, and she is having to overcome the stamp of being somebody's little sister. Or maybe it's an advantage, I don't know. They seem to love my son at that camp. Most of the counselors and the kids all know him from his years there, and he seems to have conducted himself well enough. 

When we drove our girl up to camp, he came along for the ride to see to his old friends. Once there, the camp deputy director and counselors actually cajoled/teased/pleaded with him to come back and work this year. They were understaffed for the first session, and since my son hadn't yet found a summer job in the city, he said yes. (So much for his plans to party in the city his last summer before college.)

They day we drove up, all the girls came running out to meet my daughter (she was late to camp because of her Nana's funeral), or more likely (we suspected) to greet her brother. I had told my son that he needed to be nice to his sister, because all the little 14 and 15 years old girls would queue off how he treated her. I think he got what I was saying. He's seen enough girl wars to understand.

The campers sleep in platform tents in the woods, beside a beautiful lake in which they swim, canoe, kayak, raft, and dive from big blue and yellow water trampolines. They also jump off rock cliffs into the water (that's the lake pictured above). The teen campers, who are together on one side of the lake, cook their own meals over open firepits in the woods. This week, my daughter and several other campers and counselors are on a 6-day bike ride through five northeastern states, cycling all day and sleeping in churches at night. My son did this same trip at my daughter's age, and now, as then, I wake up every morning with a prayer in my throat, asking God to keep those children safe. I am thrilled that my children's teen years can include such an expedition, but my heart seizes all the same. The trick is to keep my fears to myself and let them out into the world to enjoy their lives.

My daughter comes home from camp in two-and-a-half more weeks, after spending six weeks there. My son will be also there until the end of the first session. Since they made him a counselor instead of a counselor assistant, he is getting paid rather well, which will come in handy in the fall. He will come back home for one single week before we have to drive him upstate to college. He is so out in the world now. I hope he is well and truly raised, because our shift is just about over. It's on him to make his life work now. From here on, we're mainly consultants, ready and willing if he turns to us, but no longer directing the show.

God, it was fast.