Summer '18 at the Camp

We are delighting in an uninterrupted week at the camp, a vacation long-anticipated and much-savored. Every year I grow older and my love for this place increases. I love the soft moss under my bare feet in the yard and I love admiring the endless varieties of forest ferns. I love the smell of cut pine, old moss, of fresh rain, of curling smoke, of cabin wood, and I love how they blend together as one “mountain air”. I love the calm glassiness of the lake after rain, and love watching the clouds and fog clear over the hills that hem in the lake. I love reading to the lull of the dock bobbing in the gentle waves from passing boats. I love cooking hearty and delicious meals without a time limit or hurry. I stir a roux and roll out biscuits and prepare a pie crust and bake a cake and all the while feel my sisters with me, the ones who taught me these skills in this very kitchen. I love cozy naps on the couch, gently serenaded by the falling rain on the tin roof above. I love walks on Easter lane hand-in-hand with my love, and most of all, canoe paddles around to all the corners of the lake. Here it is cool, quiet, peaceful, and slow. Everything creaks and sighs, with unhurried long years past and still to come. 

I think what I treasure so deeply about being at this place is not just the simple and stunning beauty or the lack of modern connectivity, but the fact that I trace my own history through the history of these walls. My dad grew up playing on this furniture, sleeping in these beds, slurping watermelon on this porch, splashing on this beach. And so did I, and so will my babies. Time has passed and the world has changed and I have grown up, but not much about the Camp has. This place has deep roots and each time I visit, I am more connected to them. I am more the daughter of Mac McDonald and the granddaughter of Dortha McDonald and the great-granddaughter of W.C. and Stella here, than anywhere else in the world. I am more connected here to my own love story, as this place is filled with memories of Kyle and I’s early days of friendship, a growing trust, and happy days of long conversation. Here, we got engaged and first stood together at the dawn of our life together, imagining children and homes and a whole future stretched out before us. A billion memories are here for me, and more to be had with each passing year. This is the Camp.