Alumni Day of Giving

She parked by the gate and stepped out. The air smelled just the same — pine needles, damp earth, and that faint smoky scent that always seemed to linger long after the last campfire went out.

She walked toward the clearing, her shoes crunching over gravel. The cabins were smaller than she remembered. The dock was shorter. But the lake — that shimmer of silver and blue — was exactly the same.

Suddenly she was ten again, racing barefoot down this very path, a towel flapping like a cape. She could almost hear her friends’ voices — Claire calling out that the canoe was tipping, Lily laughing so hard she couldn’t paddle.

There had been songs, too. Songs sung around the fire with sticky fingers and sunburned cheeks, the kind that somehow felt important, like secrets shared with the night sky.

She smiled, remembering the counselor who’d told her, “You don’t have to be the loudest one in the group to shine.” She hadn’t known it then, but that sentence had followed her — through college, through hard jobs, through everything that required quiet courage.

She sat down on the old wooden dock, trailing her fingers in the water. The lake was cool and calm, reflecting the same sky she used to stare at before lights-out.

It hit her — camp wasn’t just a place she went. It was a place that became part of her. 

The part of her that learned to make friends, to paddle straight, to laugh when things went wrong — it all started here, where the pines still whispered and the stars still told stories.