Summertime done...

..come and gone, my oh my

Summer's over. That means a couple things. One - i'm back from camp. Two - i'm updating my blog. Thinking back to the summer and my lack of blogging, one topic I meant to blog about was the title of my blog and where it came from. I reference it on the left hand column, but it's a long essay, and there's a lot more meaning to it for me.

My camp is divided up into multiple sessions, 3 of them being "senior" sessions. Our camp director begins each of these senior sessions with a reading from the foreword of A Sand County Almanac, which is a discussion of the value of wild things. On the final night of each session we have a "final ceremony". During this final ceremony, staff members share poems or songs, we give out "awards" (ex: Commander Salamander or Helter Skelter in a Summer Shelter or King of the Ant Hill ...thank you nature camp), and our director does another reading. This final reading is parts of Loren Eiseley's "The Bird and Machine". Because she has read it at the end of every senior session, I've heard it more times than I can count. No, that's not true, I can probably count the times. But it's really a wonderful essay if you have not read it.

To me it means more than just what the essay provides. It also means camp, which has been my home for many a summer. And it means an end, the end of a session or the end of a summer. Not a bad end, but a reflective one. How has my summer reflected what is written in this essay? This is often not a hard answer to come by, given life at nature camp.

So that is why... it's life I believe in!

[ ps, that there is a bald eagle! ]