Today campers are arriving at the summer camp where I was a camper and where I spent one very memorable summer as a camp counselor. It has me reminiscing.
6 summers ago, I had just graduated from high school, and I got a job I didn’t even apply for. On the day before I was supposed to leave with my family for a Disney World vacation, I got a phone call from the camp, asking me if I had plans for the summer and could I please consider working as a counselor? Yes, I was a year too young according to the rules, but they were short on staff, and I was an experienced camper. Not looking forward to spending the summer at home with my parents, I said, of course, but I can’t be there until I get back from Florida, which would cause me to miss the first week of staff training.
On the day I arrived, one other counselor was also arriving a week late, because his sister had just gotten married and he couldn’t make it to camp until after the wedding. We were introduced in the dining room and I immediately thought he was the cutest boy I’d ever seen. I schemed to sit next to him for CPR training, during which time we got into trouble with the instructor for talking too much. That evening the staff had a cook-out in the Outback Adventure Area, where we would be spending the night in cabins and learning how to do cook-outs as we would with our own campers each week of the summer. I remember that we tossed a frisbee. I remember that I loved his laugh. We started chatting around a campfire with several other counselors, but before too long, we were the only two still up. I saw three shooting stars, which he claimed were really just fireflies, but they couldn’t have been. Because I made three wishes. And they came true. (I KNOW! Totally cheesy and ridiculous but absolutely true!) Continue reading “summer lovin’”
