Camp. Summer. Yep, that's it.

This weekend marks the return of a powerful tradition in my family-- the start of summer sleepaway camp. Of the 50 or so years I’ve been on this planet, I’ve spent some portion of 33 of those years in some form of sleepaway camp. When I was young, my parents worked at a camp. For years, my father was the camp director and my mother ran the arts & crafts program. I attended that camp from the age of six months ‘til I was seventeen. I went from camp baby to camper to counselor and have a list of camp songs permanently etched in my brain to prove it!

As you can imagine, at seventeen I had other things on my mind and I wanted out. After college, I started working and no longer had a schedule that permitted summers at sleepaway camp. But that changed in 1996 when I watched a feature on TV about the Birch Family Camp. The camp was created as a response to the growing AIDS/HIV epidemic and it provided a summer respite (“more than a week in the woods”) for families in which at least one child in the family was HIV positive. After tearfully watching a segment about the camp on 60 Minutes, I contacted the camp to work as a volunteer. (Unfortunately, the original 60 Minutes piece isn't available online. This is a link to a 10 minute video about the camp made a few years later.) With the exception of a few senior staff, everyone working at the camp was a volunteer.

I spent a week at Birch Camp for the next 13 years, taking one year off when I was pregnant--but returning the following year with my infant daughter in tow.

By the time she was old enough to begin sleepaway camp herself, I had changed careers and was now a university professor. Semesters ended in time for me to “circle of life” back to camp. She began full summer camp, and I began working at camp again. My childhood camp had since closed, but the children of many of my original camp friends had migrated to another camp (including my sister and her family) so we started summers at Camp Nockamixon.

Now, a few years later, I no longer work at the camp, but the family tradition continues with my daughter’s return to camp each summer.

My friends today have their own summer traditions, and very few of them include sleepaway camp. But even as an adult, finding someone who spent childhood summers at sleepaway camp is like finding a long lost friend. Even if you went to different camps, you likely share similar memories. There is some deep part of me that just IS camp. It’s a place in which I feel connected to my parents, my sister, and myself. It’s a place where most of my deepest friendships have been made. Every once in a while a post will appear in the Huffington Post, or an article will appear in Buzzfeed about summer camp. Sometimes, a famous person will write a book about the character-shaping years of their early summer camp experiences. If you attended camp, you could write those articles yourself. If you didn’t, no amount of writing can truly convey the feeling.

Before I got married, I said to my boyfriend-soon-to-be-husband, “just so you know, with my last dollar, my child is going to overnight camp”- THAT was the one non-negotiable.

So as I send my daughter off to her camp home, I remember all that camp has meant to me. I know that I was my best self at camp. I hope she will find her best self there too.