On the first night of the second week of my third summer of Camp, I was a counselor in Bowfin, the littlest girls' cabin. On Sunday night as we were tucking our girlies into their bunk beds, the tears came. Some of the girls had never spent the night away from home before. Some girls were just tired, which expressed itself through crying. And then when a thunderstorm started, so did the wailing.
It terrified all of the little girls and nobody could sleep. There were four counselors in Bowfin that week - three group counselors and one counselor-in-training, and we had eight campers, and each of us took care of calming down a bunk bed of girls.
That night was its own very specific kind of pandemonium: high school and college students rushing around a dark cabin in very hushed voices trying to get a bunch of little girls to peace and sleep. It was the kind of situation where I took a second and stopped and thought about what I was doing and smiled. I was surrounded by bawling baby girls, and I loved it. I was simply thrilled to be where I was in that one short moment.
One of our girls in Bowfin that week was a short, slightly chubby girl with blond hair. She was eight and a half, a little older than most of the other girls in our cabin. She was shy, but shy quickly dissipates at Camp when a group of eight girls and their four counselors do absolutely everything together and love each other so much. But it was only the first night, and her shyness was still there.
She was scared of the thunderstorm just like the other girls, but she wasn't crying. I thought she was asleep because she wasn't making any noise, but she asked me to come and just sit with her. She was scared and she was lonely.
And so once all of the other girls were settling down, when there were still sniffles but no more sobs, I went to sit with her. We whispered so quietly and she talked to me. She told me that her mom didn't live with her family anymore, and she lived with her dad and her brother. She really loved them but she didn't like being the only girl. Her brother was also at Camp that week and every time she saw him, she hugged him. He didn't love it, but he let her do it, and I think he secretly did kind of love it. She asked me what my dad was like and I told her that he was goofy. She said her dad was too sometimes.
At the beginning of that week, we were very close. She called me Mama and I called her Baby. As the week went on, she needed me less - she bonded with the other girls and was silly and fun with them. Her shyness faded. But still sometimes, when we were walking somewhere, she would suddenly be next to me and holding my hand. It made me smile.
The week went by quickly - they all do. On Friday night, I was helping her pack up to go home. In one of her drawers I found a red plush velvet heart that said "Be mine."
It wasn't well-made, but it was soft and sweet. It was the kind of trinket that would have been just a trinket if she had not given it meaning.
She gave it to me. And I didn't want to take it from her, but also I did. I tried to convince her to keep it, but she wanted me to have it. I kept it. Then the next day was Saturday and she went home. After she left that Saturday I worried about the heart - it was so small. I was afraid of losing it. At Camp, I live out of plastic purple trunks, and they're filled with children's books and socks and Reese's wrappers and stationery and crafts that campers forgot and I wanted to keep to remember them by and pens and sunscreen and toenail polish bottles and beads. I knew my little heart would get mixed in with all of those things and I was afraid of it not appearing when I unpacked at the end of the summer.
But then it did appear! And once school started back that fall, I put the heart in my backpack, along with my jar of peanut butter, and carried those two things around with me everywhere I went.
Later that year I stumbled upon this e. e. cummings poem -
As I read it I thought of the heart that I physically carried around - the heart of that one little girl, and the other little girls that week, and the campers from that whole summer, and the campers from all of my years. I thought of how they each had my heart, like a horcrux, a soul split into a million pieces and spread all over the world in beautiful and sacred places. I thought about moments like the one from the first night of the second week of my third summer, where around me so many things were happening and there was really not time to pause and relish joy but I did because I was nothing but serenely delighted to be where I was, in happy-busy times, in times of running around but also times of singing and holding a hand or two.
Love,
Lauralicious
