Camp Sick

Lately everyone has been obsessed with Fall. Everyone is eating caramel apple pops and drinking pumpkin spice lattes like they're the greatest things ever invented. Uggs and knee high boots are here to stay. People are carving pumpkins and hitting every apple orchard and haunted house in a hundred mile radius. But in the midst of bright scarves and a canopy of changing leaves I'm feeling a bit camp sick.

I want to wear my neon Team CILT hat backwards all day long. I want to have rest hour in the middle of the day even if it's only actually rest twenty minutes. I want to eat at a table with my best friends and our campers. I want it to be easier to be positive all day long.

Summer is ten weeks long. One week of staff training followed by nine weeks with campers. For me and many of my friends, those weeks at Tecumseh are the most formative, impactful and meaningful weeks of my whole year. Whether you're a counselor that gets to stay the whole time or a camper that has only come for a week, you can't deny that this place is special.

I want to walk back across Main Field after a night off and stop right in the middle and look up at the stars to soak in the moment. I want to feel summer through the sun on my shoulders, the sand in my Crocs and the chlorine in my hair.

I want to sing loudly and dance crazy and give hugs and not have anyone think it's out of the ordinary. I want to make a difference in the span of a week. I want to sing praise with a choir of campers and counselors every single morning in the great outdoors.

I'll still live in the moment-- promise. I went on a Fall walk to get lattes with Emel and tonight I'll go to a Fall Party and sit around a bonfire. But while I'm living life in this Fall-obsessed world a big part of me is still thinking about summer and my camp kids and how if I were there right now we'd be walking from the lake to pop stop... except that it's Saturday so I'd be doing laundry and napping and writing CILT parent letters.

I want to start up a conversation and friendship with a kid sitting on a bench by flagpole. I want to declare today neon-hipster-outfit-day just because theme days are fun. I want to be able to ask my campers what they remember from chapel and devotions this week.

I want to trade tall buildings for tall trees and my morning commute for a 30-second walk to flagpole. I want to make each week more fun than the last one, determined to make it the best week of the summer for my girls. I want to help counsel the future counselors of this place.

Today one of my first campers ever messaged me and said, "I hope you're living large this fall." I'm going to work to live life to the full all year long of course, and I know that the forty-two non-camp weeks will bring incredible adventures, conversations, friendship, and experiences of their own. But I think I'll always be at least a little bit camp sick.