I wrote this a couple of years ago for a writing group I was in. Since summer is coming up, and many will be missing the camp experience this time around, it seems like a good time to let this out into the world:

A camp is temporary. Fleeting. It is an adventure and…

I am ten years old, and it is my first time at a sleep-away camp. I am at a week-long soccer camp, staying in a dorm room at a university. I feel grownup staying in a college dorm. I am enjoying the soccer but not the unforgiving social circus. One girl, who is supposed to be my friend, is mean to me. I feel awkward and uncertain of my place here. The independence and sense of adventure of being away from my parents excite me, but I am homesick.

I am twelve years old, at another week-long overnight camp. This one is a church camp. The bunk beds are terrifying. They are narrow, without railings, and I have to sleep on the top. I stick books between the bed frame and the mattress to create a makeshift railing. Flimsy though it is, maybe it will be enough to keep me from falling off the bed and cracking my head open on the concrete floor. There are crickets in the cabins too. I am also terrified of bugs that jump, so this is bad news for me. Each day on our way to the outdoor chapel, we all walk down the silent trail. It’s maybe two feet wide, bordered on either side by small white fence about six inches high. We are supposed to be completely silent while on the trail out of reverence for God. Other kids talk anyway while on the trail but I never do. One time I want to say something so I jump over the little fence and say it and then jump back over. That way I don’t cheat. I am really irritated at the cheating kids. Why can’t they obey the rules?

I am sixteen. I’m at a camp for female Christian athletes in the mountains of Colorado. I’m an athlete, but I’m not so sure I’m a Christian, or at least that I’m the kind of Christian the people at the camp want me to be. I am here anyway, though, because my friends are here and because I don’t know where else to be. And so I struggle through the appeals to pray and read the Bible and get saved. Fortunately, there is also music and quiet time and good food and camaraderie. Each night the whole camp gathers in the auditorium for skits and sharing and singing. We sing a bunch of songs, but there is one we sing a cappella. It’s my favorite. The room fills with a hundred voices, and the result is, well, holy. Being part of that music making is the closest I feel to God all week.

I am twenty-two years old, a senior in college. My housemates and I are camping out in the woods of western Connecticut. We have come to watch another housemate row in a crew race on a nearby lake that weekend. We talk and laugh in our tent, falling asleep hours later to the sounds of the night. There is nothing else in those woods that weekend but us and our fun. I don’t want to go home.

I am forty-five years old. I am at a cabin in upstate New York with my family, immediate and extended. The cabin belongs to my brother-in-law’s family. They call it “camp,” and I never know whether to call it “camp” or “the cabin.” There are eleven of us—four adults and seven children—sharing this five-bedroom, one-bathroom space for one week. We hike in the mountains and swim and kayak in the lake, and we let our kids go the whole week without showering. Someone is always eating, someone is always using the bathroom, and the washing machine gets tired from all the laundry it has to clean. But the kids play board games and card games instead of video games. They read and fight and make up their own religions. The kids eat around a big table in the kitchen, while the adults have dinner on the screened-in porch on a small glass table. The table isn’t really big enough for all of us, but we crowd around it anyway. We can just fit four plates and glasses and the silverware. After we’re done eating, we listen to the chaos coming from the kitchen and watch the woodpeckers click click at the tree just outside the porch. I wish I had a pair of binoculars. When I go to bed at night, I can hear the loons calling through the open windows in our bedroom. I never get tired of hearing their haunting, mysterious song.

I am all of the years old. I inevitably go to camp in my mind every day, as much as I try to remain wherever I am. Life isn’t perfect at camp, but it is full. My capacities to give and receive are exceeded, and it can’t get much better than that.