And that's it! That's all she wrote. (Who's she?) Summer 2014 is done, it has elapsed, it is over, finished, and happened, put in in the books! Put it! In the books!
It started on the morning of June 15th as the Senior Staff arrived to begin planning and training, and lasted every single moment from then until the evening of August 16th, when we finished our final campfire and thank you circle at the Staff Banquet and the counselors said their last good nights (and not goodbyes) of the summer.
What happened in between? Everything. Everything that could possibly happen in a Summer on a hundred and eight acres in the middle of the woods around a little lake happened. Too much to put into little silly words on the internet, and too much to sum up with pictures and stories.
But, since pictures and stories are all we have, we sure will try to sum it up with them. Leonard Cohen says "if your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash", and though all of our campfires of 2014 have finished burning, the ash they've left behind are those pictures, stories, and memories of 62 warm days that last forever at summer camp.
And what makes a summer camp? Not the old buildings, not even these mystic woods and magic lake. A summer camp is just the people who were here, and as we say at our World Famous Thank You Circle, "thank goodness each and everyone one of us were here, because if we weren't here, we wouldn't be here!" We'd remember each and everyone one of us regardless, but just for safe measure we keep a list. So we don't lose it, we put it on a wall.
A couple hundred signatures of a couple hundred campers and counselors who made Summer 2014 everything it was.
The mural in the middle, a wonderful piece of art by our very own Counselor Lindsey Filo, is based on one of our favorite campfire songs (...come to think of it, so is the name of this blog). Something tells me you'll see this design around camp more in the future...we really like it.
The songs says that "we come from the mountains, we come from the fire, we come from the water, we come from the sky...go back to the mountains, and turn the world around." In a way, that's exactly what we hope every name on this wall did and experienced.
Now, as with everything at camp, this wall will be white-washed over so we can start again fresh in Summer 2015, but here at camp we know that the names on that wall never go away, they stay carved into camp and it's history and it's spirit permanently.
And that's Summer 2014. Put it in the books.
We're already getting to work on Summer 2015. We can't wait to see you here.
