Where the Root and Rock Reside
“And the seasons, they go ‘round and ‘round
Even years away, our love is found.
Deep in our hearts, embedded in our souls.
She keeps us striving for our highest goals dreamed in our minds,
‘Til we’ve gained those things our hearts set out to find.”
This summer, I found myself invited back into a story that began decades ago – a story that shaped me in ways I am still trying to name. I went to summer camp shy, unsure, and soft-spoken, hoping to belong but not quite knowing how. Somewhere between swims in the Cowpasture River, the long walks under the pines, mosquito bites and whispered flashlight talks, I learned what it felt to belong. Those summers left a deep impression – a foundation for how I understand friendship, community, and myself.
One friendship, in particular, never faded. She and I met when we were eleven. One afternoon during rest hour – that sacred quiet after lunch when everyone lay on their bunks – I asked what she was doing. “Knitting,” she said. I told her I wished I knew how, and without a second thought she slipped off her bed, found two sticks, carved them into needles, and pressed them into my hands.
There was no pause, no gate for me to pass through. Just like that, I was included. For the first time, maybe ever, I felt unmistakably seen by someone my own age.
I had always been a creative kid, but there was something about the way she did it – the precision of carving, the resourcefulness, the sheer wildness of making your own tools from the woods – that left an imprint. It wasn’t about learning to knit; it was about the quiet insistence that you can make a thing where there was nothing, that you can shape your world with your own hands. In my small, unsure self, that lesson—and that friendship—landed as a seed.
She is now a mother of three, and her girls all go to the same place that shaped us wee women. Her oldest is nearing the age we were when we first met, and in her I can see my friend’s fierce tenderness shining through, like an echo that’s somehow new.
When this friend invited me to join a small group of alumni for a reunion-slash-retreat, I was touched beyond words. Ten of us gathered, spanning nearly twenty-five years of summers. We were a patchwork of ages and experiences, and yet we fit together like we’d been stitched that way on purpose.
We gathered around the memory of a camper we lost this past year. She was young—far too young—and her death has left a wide wake. Though I had lost touch with her after I aged out of camp, her absence was palpable. It was clear how much she meant to those who knew her best: she was someone who had been deeply, fiercely loved, and that love was evident in every story shared about her—the funny ones, the hard ones, the ones that held pain and devotion in the same breath.
We cried together, sat with the weight of it, and let the silence between us be long. There were tears, and there was laughter. It felt like one of the purest expressions of what those summers gave us: the capacity to sit together through both joy and sorrow.
We weren’t at camp—we were in Palm Springs, of all places—but it didn’t seem to matter. Around the gas fire pit, as we sang songs under the night sky, you could almost smell the campfire smoke. Someone mentioned the way you can walk those trails in the dark without a flashlight, how your feet remember where every root and rock resides. The muscle memory of knowing exactly where to step—of knowing a place so well it becomes a part of you.
For some of us, it was the first place we ever called home on our own terms. A place that let us memorize the stars and the trails until they lived under our skin.
This place is a thread. It runs through each of us, stitching across time and generations. It holds us, and we hold it—not just when we gather, but in the quiet ways we carry it forward into our lives.
I came home feeling both younger and older: connected to the girl I was and grateful for the woman I have become. I am full in a way that feels hard to name. It’s almost like carrying a secret, one that keeps spilling into my life in small, quiet ways: the way I listen, the way I laugh, the way I hold space for others, the way I love.
When I was young, the camp was doing the weaving. Now, I am the one weaving—continuously letting it move through my hands, working it into the life I am building, the person I am still becoming.
