Reunion

The young tend to shudder at images of their own earlier selves and attempt to disown them. With time you stop doing that of course. I look at a picture like this of a girl from my camp days and all I can think is how lovely she is. If we could have found her for this camp reunion I'm on maybe she would think so too.Yesterday we visited the place that lives in our memory, Camp Fernwood in the Berkshires it was called then. Now it's Camp Emerson and has been for 40 years and more.But enough remains of the place we remember to have held us there for two whole hours; in fact a few of us would have stayed longer; would have loved to play a quick game of softball on that field.Other kids have loved it there since, as all the graffiti shows. This scribbling from the early 1990s was made by a boy who could well be an investment banker by now. Was he threatening not to ‘come back’ next year, or  mourning the fact? From what I know of Emerson, my money’s on the second one.  My own child came here for the three  happiest summers of his young life. He was happy there as we had been - because at camp you're free from your school, your neighborhood, your family even. You make a new family, strictly of your peers, and it is wonderful.Many of us were only five years old when we started camp and the little-kid section was fun enough. We had swings and a sandpile only occasionally blessed by a visiting skunk. But it seems to me the fun really started when we got to be around 12. That's how old I was when we made this pyramid. I'm the funny-looking one in the second row on the right. Beside me is Meredith Chapman, my best friend and cabin-mate that year and for all of five of the years she attended.She was there with us yesterday. We stood in front of the 1920s-era cabin that we first lived in together, now slated for demolition. Meredith lives on Lake Champlain now and reads to the blind and does hospice work. I live here and do this work, whatever you might call it.In an hour we will all pack and go home, we women in our 50s 60s and 70s. But yesterday and the day before we were all campers and young, reaching high adn higher still again and playing  under a sun that never sets.