Story #52: Going to Camp

What a surprise, it is 3 a.m. and I am packing to go to camp. I am having flashbacks to last year. Tonight's production is much less extreme than that, though, because when that post was written I was moving out of my whole entire house and going away for almost twelve weeks...unlike now when I am just trying to write a four-day-weekend worth of curriculum and pack up for a school day, a work night, a city sleepover, and a family camp's worth of time away from home.

Somehow it's still hard and it's still the middle of the night and I'm still awake.

I had gotten really good at packing and unpacking, those sixteen months that I was away. Thinking back on that time I cannot help but remember packing for camp, since that was where I went first when I left behind my fancy and well-appointed but underwhelming life in San Francisco. The day that the movers came to take my things out of 1000 Judah and put them into storage, the morning I dropped off my soon-to-be un-partner at the airport and drove someone else's Subaru up into the mountains for the very first time was the beginning of my life at camp and of my year-and-a-half-long sabbatical. I had no idea what was ahead of me and my only refuge from the craziness of living in the woods with hundreds of other people was my little camp house behind the office beside the trail on the way down to Pipeline. That first summer I learned a lot about how to live in nature and in community, how to be flexible and accepting when it comes to dirt, and how to be honest and patient with myself. Now it is two years later and the lessons are different but the need to always learn them, and about who I am, is the same. Packing, while it had gotten very easy during all those months, is hard again.

Back then all I had was three bags and five pairs of pants and my stuffed sheep Pierre. My home was wherever I was, I had no place else to go. Now I have a couch and a Kitchen Aid Mix Master, I have recycling to take out and plants to water before I leave town. Which is easier? Both are complicated. Which teaches me more? In the process of first going away and later coming home, I have discovered how to learn no matter where I go. Camp will always be a home to me, and packing has gotten easier since the first time I went because now I know exactly what ratio of days away to clean socks I should use when calculating my wardrobe needs. What hasn't gotten easier is being up all hours of the night trying to get ready to go. לילה טוב, lailah tov as we say at Camp Tawonga...good night.