Camp Football

All right. So I promised Courtney yesterday that I would write about this one, so here it goes!

As I blogged about yesterday I have been deaning Sr. High Rally Camp at Camp Mechuwana since 1997. The summer of 2004 Alex Blackstone and Doug Dieuveuil started coming as campers. The following summer Courtney Carter started attending, too. The three of them were quite a hoot and kept me on my toes. Alex was a PK (Pastor's Kid) like me. Doug, or Dougie as we affectionately called him and Alex were good friends. Courtney was Courtney, and I got along so well with her. All three were people that the other campers would look up to.

Rally Camp the summer of 2007 was especially wonderful for me. It was the first summer that I didn't have to worry about having seizures as I had my Temporal Lobectomy that January. It had been just over six months since the surgery; I had my drivers’ license back and had tasted the freedom of not worrying about where I would be if I had another seizure. I had already been weaned off of the Tegretol XR, and was seeing myself increase with energy. I had also turned into a human barometer. Every time we were going to get snowstorms or rain I could tell 24 hours in advance as the location on my head that they cut off would itch like crazy. It's been five and a half years and that still works. I think that I should become a meteorologist and just not have to go to school for it!

Anyway, I so loved camp that summer. The kids were now old enough to be in Day Camp, so I was able to spend from breakfast until dinner with my campers. Nick would get them from Day Camp in the afternoon, get them cleaned up and ready for dinner and then I would spend time with them after supper and get them ready for bed. One afternoon we were down by the lake for Arts and Crafts. A few of the campers did not want to do whatever it was that they were to be making that day, so they asked if they could throw a football around. Nick, Jordan and I were sitting outside the Arts and Crafts cabin and told them that it was ok. So Dougie and Alex started tossing that lovely piece of leather around. A few times it came really close to us and a few times Nick said, "Guys, you are chucking it a little too close here. The last thing that you want to do is clobber her in the head and make her go funny again." We were all of course laughing about it, but the last thing I wanted to have happen would be to have something heavy hit the left side of my head. "Oh sure, Nick. Don't worry, we'll be careful."

The next thing that I knew was that I felt a giant "WHAM" right on the left side of my head. I remember tilting over and splattering onto the boardwalk. I think I got knocked out for a brief moment. I also can now say that the way they do it in the movies is true; when you get knocked out and then come to you can see little yellow birdies floating around your head. "WHAT DID I TELL YOU?" I heard Nick's loud, boisterous voice yell. It took a few minutes and I didn't think that I needed to go to the nurse, but let's just say that Alex and Dougie were exceptionally well behaved for the rest of the week! The two of them were so apologetic, and it was ok with me. All I could think of was "Wow. What would have happened if the bad part of my brain was still there?"

As I said, it's been five and a half years since that surgery, and I still am a human barometer. And I still think, though not as often, "What would happen to me now if I had another one?" I think there will always be this little thing in the back of my head thinking the "What if's?" Living without the daily threat of seizures has really made me learn how to live again. I know I am the same person who went into that operating room, but things about me have definitively changed (which I will discuss in another blog). But learning to live again has been an extremely eye-opening experience. And I can't wait to see what it brings next.

My Happy Place

Maine. The Way Life Should Be. I could go by that.

The younglings and I are up in Maine for a while. They take off to go visit their dad and other “siblings” in Colorado on July 4^th. So until then we have moved in with my parents for a few weeks. The kids have been staying up here with my parents on the weekends when I have to go back to work.  So far, so good. We have had a few days down at the beach, day trips, and then last week when it was unbearably hot everyone just hung around the house. Tonight we did a trip to Mike’s Clam Shack and the kids were in seventh-heaven. They are now camped out in front of the TV watching a movie, Mom is playing on Facebook, and I was sitting here trying to get stuff together for camp, but I decided to write for a bit instead.

I apologize for not writing on my blog for a while, but things have been a wee bit funky for a while. My dear ex-husband was not being very user-friendly for an extended period of time and I had a few majorily depressing breakdowns for a while, but I am working on picking myself back up. And I am counting down the days. Twenty-nine more days. Until I get to my happy place. And my happy place is Camp Mechuwana.

I started going to Mechuwana when I was in third grade. A whopping eight years old. My cousin Joey went with me, and my dad was a counselor. I went to Tent Camp. For those of you familiar with Mechuwana it was where the Villiage now is. In the early 80’s it was simply big tents on cement slabs with cots (at least I think they were cots) inside. The things I remember about that year was braving the lake (which I have grown to love), getting my first tip-test bruise on my left thigh, cruising a meal or two and the dirty sock. From what I have not blocked from my memory, the dirty sock was a sock that had been left by a camper. The game was if you found the dirty sock in your stuff you were “It” and you had to hide it in someone else’s stuff. I remember praying each night “Lord, please, please, please don’t let the Dirty Sock show up in my stuff.” Guess what I found in underneath my pillow on Wednsday afternoon? The Dirty Sock. I went home that night. Dad and Joey finished it out, but I fell to the first-time-camper-syndrome.

I spent the next few summers at camp in Jacksonville, but started going back to Mechuwana when I was in Jr. High. I was a very artsy kind of kid; big into playing my clarinet and doing artsy projects. Linda did the camp, and I went. And I loved it! I continued going through high school. I will never forget all of the wonderful things that I made there.  And I still have all the Ukranian Eggs that I made my junior year when Tomilla took me under her wing and helped me find my little niche in life. I will always remember her for that wonderful summer! We always stayed down at Lower Camp right by the lake. It was so wonderful to fall asleep listening to the water lap against the shore right outside the back door of your cabin. And the loons. Oh, the loons! Listening to them at night was so relaxing.

The summer of 1991 my dad got  a phone call from Rev. Joan DeSanctis asking him if I would like to be a youth counselor for Jr./Sr. High Rally Camp. It was for those entering sixth grade through those who had just finished high school. Rather than go as a camper I went as a youth counselor and was head of a cabin of seven girls headed into 6^th or 7^th grade. What a blast! I took pictures that year, not many, but there is photographic evidence that I was there. I had such a wonderful time there, and made many  friends. Joan asked me if I wanted to do it again the next summer and I was all for it. I counseled the next five summers, and then took over as dean of that camp the summer of 1997. We were now just a Sr. High Rally Camp, and were staying at KK (another part of the camp) but had just as much, if not more fun! The only week I have missed since the summer of 1991 was the summer of 1999. I could only be there for part of the week as I couldn’t get that week off from work, but Joan and Julio came to my rescue and they deaned it for me that year.

Since then I have been there every summer.  In 2001 I brought Kianni and Naissa for their first stay at Mechuwana. The next summer Jayden tagged along too, and he was not quite a year old. My campers that year would argue over who got to take care of the little tyke! The kids then started Day Camp, the three of them have done Elementary Creative Arts camp, and last year Jayden had a part in Elementary Music Theater Camps musical! This summer they will be in Colorado with their dad while I am at Mechuwana. But while I am there I will hold them dearly in my heart. And when I sing that Mechuwana song “Oh Spirit of Mechuwana, beneath these cathedral trees” I will think of and pray for them, and I know that they will feel it two-thousand miles away.