Camp

Gram has asked all her children and grandchildren to write something about what Camp means to them.  Camp means so much and so many things to me that I've been avoiding this task.  I just don't really know where to start or how exactly to approach a subject that is so much about feelings and senses; smells, sights, temperatures, sounds, tastes, immersion.

Camp is immersion.   The first thing I always wanted to do when I was little and arrived at Camp in the summer was jump in the lake. Straight away.  (We didn't go to Camp in the winter back then. Never. Could the little ones in our family even imagine such a time?  We just had the camp, not Grammie's house, not a paved, plowed road leading there.  It was strictly a summer place.  You would sleep in the back seat until the limbs of the trees on Grandpa Chick's road scraped the windows of the car and woke you up.  Then you knew you were there.)  And I remember being very small and not wanting to leave Camp and actually having my sneakers on and TIED (arrggggh, that's it, when the sneaker are on and tied; you are GONE, back to that other place that isn't really home or where you want to be; the suburbs!) and "falling" off the dock into the lake so Dad would be forced to stay longer.  I don't even think I knew how to swim at the time.  I was desperate.

Now when I go to Camp it is to immerse myself in my family.  Their loudness, craziness, overbearing, over-the-top ways.  Ways that I need to escape sometimes (I am, after all, an only child, at least by some definitions).  But ways that I crave and need for sustenance and identity. So Camp is immersion.  When I am there and immersed, I know exactly who I am.  I am a Stoddard.  I am proudly my grandmother's daughter.  That's not a typo.  Anyone who knows me well knows I spent every summer, beginning when I was 5 years old, at Camp with my gram. And I am nearly as close to my mother's generation (9 years to Raetha) as to my own (6 years to Netdahe, another 3 to Henekis).  So while I love being the eldest grandchild, I also feel like gram's youngest kid.  I'm grateful to be hers AND my mom and dad's.  She helped raise me and I like to think that I take after her in some ways.  Most importantly, she taught me loyalty, acceptance, forgiveness and unconditional love. And how to swim.

Back to Camp.  When I first walk into Camp after an absence, I am struck by the smell of the aging pine and the way the light refracts through those single-paned windows.  It usually overwhelms me with emotion and this has been the case ever since I can remember.  That smell.  That light. I'm home.  I suddenly remember my childhood, my teenage years, young adulthood, and just last summer.  Everyone is in that tiny, dusty camp.  Champ is there and the two of us are playing cribbage during the day when everyone else has gone to Attitash for the Alpine Slide.  Gram is sitting in her housecoat in the early morning, sipping her third cup of coffee and watching the Today Show while I stumble out of the side room in my pajamas.  Aunts, uncles and their friends are laughing, smoking dope and watching Saturday Night Live and I spy them through the Raggedy Ann and Andy curtain that serves as my bedroom door.  Grammie and Raetha have accidently locked themselves out during a mid-week, late night skinny dip and are calling me out of sleep to let them back in.  They're giggling.  I'm heading outside to sunbathe in the front yard (or is it the BACK yard) with Rae, who is grown-up (a teenager!) and beautiful and makes it so that boys come around.   Neil and I are spending a February weekend on a mattress on the living room floor and I'm reading Jane Austin.   I'm nursing my new baby girl on that crazy fold out couch that Poppa Dick bought while aunts, uncle and cousins sleep in the next rooms.  I'm introducing everyone to my 5 week old foster child at the beginning of an intense parenting journey...

Everything else happens outside.  In the lake, in the yard, at the picnic tables, in the hammock and in the road. And now all my friends, and all of YOUR friends want to come to Camp and to Old Home Weekend.  Because Gram makes everyone feel special and at home and loved and part of a family.  Unconditionally.  Camp helps her to do this.  Gram and Camp and Family are all the same here; they all stand for each other, reference one another in their existence.  Our holy trinity.  On Old Home Weekend I am so proud to show off my extended family to my friends and my friends to my family.  Camp and Gram let me bring these people all together. I'm no only child!  And Look! at how charming and strange and brilliant and f-ed up and neurotic we all are.  Look at the ways we've screamed at and mistreated one another, but continue to come together in love.  Look at the way we take care of our children and each other. Look at how we always come back to Camp, no matter what.  It's love.  It's why I know love so well.  If Gram hadn't given us all Camp and herself, it wouldn't be this way.  Love would be something else and it wouldn't be nearly as rich or safe or encompassing.  I can't even imagine who I'd be.