Camp Hug 'n Sing

I could write a book about the camp my family owned, where my sister Nan and I spent summers, from the time we were babies in our mother’s arms to that final day when, with the place sold and all of us awash in tears, we hugged Millie a final time, climbed into the old beach wagon and drove into an uncertain future. Millie had been there for over a quarter of a century, since that day she walked up the driveway looking for work, a war refugee with heavily accented English and a babe in her own arms.“I have a conviction that a few weeks spent at a well-organized summer camp may be of more value educationally than a whole year of formal school work” said Charles William Eliot, President of Harvard for 40 years and maybe he’s the guy who started the whole summer camp movement that fed my family for another 40 years after that. When my friend Bobbie wrote about the days she was my counselor at good old Camp Fernwood, our common friend Maggie weighed in with this quote.Being there was like having 70 sisters and we had such fun putting on plays, swimming and running and short-sheeting the counselors’ beds – even sneaking through the woods after Taps to meet boys from the camp down the road and sit shyly beside them for ten minutes before our fear of discovery hustled us back to our cabins. Still, what I remember most about my years there is the singing we did - all that singing by the campfire.....Up top here are some of us little campers in the Parents weekend play. (I’m the one on the left.) And down below here are two more pictures, going way back to when our mother and Aunt Grace were just starting out themselves. That's Aunt Grace smack in the middle who later taught and mentored so many young people. And that's Mom with her back to the camera, hands on her hips. It must have been the last day of the season because she sure-enough hated high heels and yet she had them on, presumably to greet the parents fetching their children home after eight weeks away. I especially like the second picture below it with the mad hugging of the adolescents, who, I sometimes think, are the only people who get what’s really important in life.