Silver Memory - I Want To Linger

(I am re-typing this post as the computer deleted it last night. Unfortunately, the mood and words are lost; I still want to leave something, though.)

Certain experiences of childhood define who we are or who we think we are based on what we hold onto as adults. While I am cynical and often angry, I also am nostalgic, sentimental sap. Thus, yesterday's anniversary was not lost on me. To get to it, twenty-five years ago marked my fist time I traveled to Angwin, California, in wine country, for my first week of 4-H Camp. This camp is the greatest place on earth. I loved my time so much that summer (I was eleven) that I returned for the next six years as a camper and counselor (I rose up to being camp director my last year) and I visited for three following years after my involvement in 4-H. I came to love nature, a certain spiritual connection with creation. I fell in love with the new people I met, the music I was exposed to, with the 'foxhole' experience with friends that I only spent one week out of an entire year with and yet still felt so close with. I learned about love. I fell in it. I fell out of it. I heard "Stairway to Heaven" for the first time (in 1986, August 15th, to be exact). I felt 'cool' there, something I did not feel growing up in my home town. And here I am, a quarter-century later, still wishing for a tiny sliver of a chance to return to that one moment of my life when everything was so wonderful in that place and with those friends. God, I still love that place.