You’ve Got Mail—P.S.
My final postcards are in our mailbox ready to be picked up by our mail carrier. Hope they’ll arrive on the last day of camp … and not the day after! Here at my blog, however, I have a little postscript to these couple of weeks at Takodah.
I first went to Takodah as a 9-year-old camper. Did several years as a camper. Then became an LIT, and eventually a Leader, Division Head, and kitchen-worker-during-boys’-camp for my college-year summers.
Several years down the road, Takodah instituted a Family Camp program, extending their programing by one week at the end of summer. Despite the oft-invoked admonition that you can’t go home again, I discovered that I could go to camp again, and did from 1981-2007. Outstanding!
Then another pause until, in 2015, my daughter Meg proposed that we get the next generation to Takodah, i.e. she invited me to go to family camp with her family.
CAMP!
When we sent in our registration, I indicated that our top choice for a cabin would be one of the older original ones, specifically one of those that had horizontal shutters over screened window openings. Part and parcel of the cabin experience is the task of searching the ground around the periphery outside the cabin for lengths of fallen branches/sticks that can be used to prop the shutters open.
We were assigned Cabin C. With shutters! CAMP!
One reason I’m writing this post is to share a painting I did in 2015, one of my favorites I’ve ever painted; notice the shutters propped open with sticks.
6 x 6″; acrylic on gessobord
2015
The other purpose of this postscript is to share from Takodah’s online posting of daily photos from this summer a photo that stopped me in my tracks.
Notice the pieces of cut-and-measured lumber, with hinges, nailed to the cabin to be utilized to prop up the shutters.
NOOOOO, say it ain’t so.
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12 responses to “You’ve Got Mail—P.S.”
Wow, Sheila—great memory re the painting of a cabin with towels and bathing suits out drying; I had two of those : )
Your noticing of the light in the leaves is fun for me, in part because the light in the leaves is so much a part of the way camp is such an outdoors-much-of-the-day experience but also because it was with this painting that I had a significant painting moment of understanding at a gut level the importance of warm versus cool colors. I’d been stumped about how to make a painting of a green cabin set in green foliage work, and then I figured it out!
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I missed this one during my COVID fog….but I loved hearing more of the history of this long standing family camp experience. And I’m enjoying your heartwarming renderings. Then I got to the end and laughed out loud with your disapproval of letting go of the sticks. Yes! Some things don’t need to be fixed!
Music to my ears that you enjoyed both the heartwarming renderings and my snarky disapproval of change that I never approved!!!
Precisely—some things ain’t broke and don’t need fixin’!
The light in the leaves is delightful. Thanks so much for sharing your memories and “camp” with us. So fun!
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