I like it when the girls stop by for the summer.

Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;

And let the misty mountain-winds be free
      To blow against thee: and, in after years,
      When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
      Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
      Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,                       
      Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
      For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
      If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
      Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
      Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
      And these my exhortations! 
I am so blessed to have experienced the beauty that Wordsworth described in his poem, Tintern Abbey.  The excerpt above is my favorite part of the entire poem, which we read in english last year. When we read it for the first time, my teacher asked us to think of a place that we could relate to this poem. Mine was so simple: Camp Skyline.
Let me set the stage for you: Eight years ago, I climbed into the car with my entire family and drove two hours to a tiny town in northern Alabama. I had never been much of a homebody, so I was excited to spend some time away and clear my very full fifth-grade head. Two weeks of endless club meetings, terrifying climbs up the ladder to the blob, mediocre birdhouses, and waaaay too many snickerdoodles later, I climbed into the same car with my entire family and drove two hours to a comparatively big city in central Alabama. But my life was altered forever.
Somewhat overdramatic, but yes, I consider my life to be completely different because of my time spent at camp. Something about it has a draw to my like nothing else in my life. I met some of my greatest friends there, as well as several role models. There is a cleansing that takes place at camp that you can't get anywhere else, and the nearness to the Lord is unmistakeable. 
Circumstances have kept me from going back to camp as a counselor last summer and the upcoming one, but my heart has been there ever since the end of Summer 2009. I left it on the Riverside bridge, in the Little River (inside the creeper, of course), above the ropes course (along with my fear of heights), inside the rocking chairs of the porch. I even left a little bit of it on top of the Rosey Den ceiling fan, where I lost quite a bit of blood after an incident with a ceiling fan. Ask the nurses about that one; I believe I hold the camp record for most bizarre accident during free period. 
This is probably completely irrelevant to anything you are interested in reading, and about half of what I just wrote probably makes no sense to you if you didn't go to camp with me, but I just had to get it out. A lot of things recently have made me miss the feeling that I get at camp. There is nothing like it; there is no way to describe it. The only way to understand it is to experience it. Which I hope you have.
Like Wordsworth says, I am so blessed to have memories of camp that I can pull out on a rainy day. When the "wild ecstasies have matured", when my mind becomes "a mansion for all lovely forms," my Skyline memory room will be the first one that I enter.


Just around the riverbend...


Shoulda been a mountie!


My sisters.