la vie en rose

Today is the 1st day of Girl's Camp for our stake. I loved camp - everything about it. The songs, the funny clothes, staying up all night, pulling pranks, canoeing, being with friends, being absolutely crazy the whole week, coming home smelling like bug spray and campfires and Irish Spring soap, exhausted but still grinning from ear to ear and full of stories. I've been to many camps, more so than anyone else my age. And since this is as much a journal for me as it is a blog, I'm going to start at the beginning.

My 1st year of camp can be summed up in 2 words: waterslides and Lenette. The summer before I started 6th grade we moved to Utah, away from Port Orchard and away from my bestest friend, Lenette. Her mom and my mom served in the stake YW presidency together. I still remember the 1st time I met Lenette - we were 8. She came over to my house so our moms could have a meeting. I had no expectations; I only knew that she liked to play dress-up like I did. We had an awesome backyard in Port Orchard - 1/4 acre of hills and molehills, a grove of trees, a playhouse that my dad built (complete with front porch), rocks and trees to climb, a swing, a 2nd story deck (stand-in for a balcony), a trampoline - I don't think a kid with a wild imagination could have asked for anything more. It was misty and damp outside (it almost always was - this is the Peninsula, after all), but I remember we set up some folding chairs on the deck and wrapped our dolls in some coats and then we were off on our airplane. I think we went to England. When she left, I knew she was already my new best friend. I only had 1 other girl my age in the neighborhood, and Sarah was 1 year older and her house smelled like garlic and cigarette smoke. My other friend was Grandma Liepman (not my actual grandmother - I've always had surrogates), whose backyard was adjacent to ours. She took me swimming and talked with me and gave me treats (she had a candy drawer just for me and Sarah). She drank boxed wine. She was lonely after her husband passed away (I think he was mowing the lawn and had a heart attack. I remember my dad looking over their fence) and I loved her like family.

But Lenette, she was my absolute best friend for the next 5 years. Even though she lived in Bremerton, our parents always made sure that we got to hang out, thanks to the foot ferry (I loved that quaint little ferry and the burly, tattooed shipyard workers that would ride it. I felt like either a pirate or a WWII-era sailor or a girl being kidnapped from the only land she knew and as she watched it sink away, she threw herself into the water and tried to drown herself, only to have a romantic savior come and rescue her (it all depended on my mood)). More on Lenette another time. For my 1st year of camp I flew back to Port Orchard to go with my old stake at Zion's Camp, just outside Belfair. I'd been to Zion's Camp a bunch of times before - to pick up my sisters when they were campers and sometimes when my mom was up there before I'd turned 12. It has cabins with metal spring bunks and wood stoves, a main longhouse that I particularly remember Allie staying in for some reason, a lot of trails and even more evergreen trees, a kick-ass rope swing, and a lake with salamanders (didn't one crawl down your swimming suit, Allie?). That was actually one of the beads you could get - a prize for the biggest salamander caught. And the beads - the Bremerton stake went all out on the beads. I'll have to take a picture of my beads, my pride and joy of camp life. One of the leaders, Phyllis (a heavy smoker but still a leader, probably because no one else could do the beads quite like she could), was a very talented wood-worker and she would make hundreds of beads by hand (I should know, I had to help paint them from the time I could be trusted to hold a paint brush steady). And even just this little taste of camp made me want more!

In the Lehi North Stake camp alternated between wards one year and then all together as a stake the next. My 1st year in Lehi was a ward year and they went all out. Our theme was "Back to Basics," a boot camp theme, but this was anything but boot camp. We went to a waterslide and mineral springs resort in Brigham City. We set up our tents on the green, under the trees, but it was warm enough to sleep outside. Some of the girls snuck into the adjacent hotel to take hot showers, and our food was pretty deluxe. It was only for 4 days, as opposed to a whole week in Washington, but really, how much can you lay out in the sun and ride the waterslides and soak in the hot springs without getting all pruney? I regretted bring the grubby clothes that I had brought to the other camp, because we were definitely not getting dirty at this place. The one thing I will never forget is how kind the older girls were to us Beehives. They actually hung out with us and included us in what they were doing. It really made me feel a part of our new ward and of the new community that we thought we would be in forever. And the other thing I'll never forget was the morning we were leaving to drive to Brigham City I put a deep conditioner on my hair that I had made out of olive oil and I couldn't get it to all rinse out. I had a big greasy mess on top of my head.

Tomorrow, 2nd year!