Eagle Lake – gianna soderstrom

that summer/winter life

July 15, 2019Posted in beauty, camp life, communityTagged Bible study, camp life, camp wife, connection, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, friends, friendship, relationshipLeave a comment

The first time I saw the sign pointing one direction towards private staff housing and another towards Eagle Lake Camp, I felt like a subtle barrier had been thrown up between that place and the rest of the property. It was before I knew anything about camp; at first I just assumed that it was somebody’s house, separate from camp operations. It seemed like the sort of outlet one should tiptoe past in order not to disturb the residents. After we joined the Navigators camp staff ourselves, I learned that that’s where we’d be housed during the summers, and I became grateful for the subtle separation. And now that I do indeed live here three months a year, turning left at the sign that points right down towards camp, that separation has slowly diminished.

The distinction on the sign is important though: it directs the camp staff and camper families in the right direction; away from the private housing of people who live here full time without working here. Towards the business center of camp. Towards the beach and the blob, the cabins and the check-in tables. Away from the two and three year olds who are just trying to nap on a Sunday afternoon, and their mamas who need a few hours of quiet.

There is a similar distinction between the life we live at camp and the live we live away from camp. I never expected quite this level of separation between my off-season community and rhythms, and the changes we make “up the mountain”. Yet they exist. Our first summer, I expected to visit friends in the city rather frequently; if I came down every week to get our mail and we came down on the weekends, surely we’d have plenty of time to join the bar-b-ques, the Bible studies, drink coffee on our back patios of a Saturday morning together? But by the end of the summer, I had only seen one friend with any regularity, and that was because she planned to move across the country at the end of the summer.

Then August came, the tenth and final week of camp rolled around on a Sunday morning and rolled past on a Friday. Campers left, and then counselors, and then program coaches, and then we did. And I realized suddenly that the old wooden sign directing the summer staff in one direction and the families in another had never really kept us apart. The girls I’d discipled over the summer took pieces of my heart back to school all across the country and even straight up into Canada. Some of my friendships would be renewed the next summer and some would not and I realized as we moved back into the range of backyard cookouts and enthusiastic greetings at Sunday School drop-offs that I missed the summer piece of my life as much as I’d missed the winter piece through camp season.

I didn’t know how to reconcile these fragments at first. How could I maintain lasting friendships with people if I was going to be gone all summer? And how could I create real bonds at camp if I was only going to say goodbye – maybe forever – after ten weeks? And yet just like the private driveway up to staff housing that loops back around to form a circle with the road, there are unexpected connections through the pieces of my year that begin to thread them together.

Camp is an undeniable part of our lives and unless my husband wanted to change jobs, there’s no way simply wouldn’t move to camp for a quarter of every year. Yet our friends “down the mountain” have taken an interest in our camp life; they offer to come up for Chapel on Sundays and ask how they can pray for us through the summer. They ask about Grant’s role and my role and they flex their tight schedules to meet me for coffee when I do, finally, come down to collect our mail.

At camp, right when I wonder if I can keep my heart open for another season of loving hard and saying goodbye, I am met by people who have answered this same question with a warm and thorough yes. People I never expected to meet take time to learn my name and greet my toddler with high-fives. Counselors I thought I barely knew are giving me hugs, winning over love I didn’t know I had left to give. I find myself looking up strange combinations of names and numbers that make up Instagram usernames so that I can follow this one to Alaska and that one to Wisconsin through their long winters until I maybe see them in the spring.

Camp will always be seven miles from home as the crow flies and remain an hour’s drive on a good day. There will never be a complete reconciliation between these two halves of life. But the way I treat the distance matters. It makes a difference that I remain open to the love these separate communities have to give – to me and to each other. Perhaps they will always seem farther apart than they truly are, but it will always be up to me to see past the dividing ridges, to recognize how close and even intersecting these two sides of the same mountain are.

beauty will save the world

June 21, 2019Posted in beauty, camp lifeTagged Anselm Society, beauty, beauty will save the world, camp life, camp wife, double rainbow, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Imagination Redeemed Conference, Imaginationredeemedconf, rainbow, wildflowersLeave a comment

I have always loved this quote, even before I knew where it was from, but I have not always believed it. Even when I heard it perfectly illustrated at a conference about the arts – about the necessity of beauty – even then I didn’t believe it. There was a seed of Midwestern Baptist doubt that nothing, not even the beauty I crave like living water, could be so instrumental in saving the world. But yesterday I found a new layer of understanding.

I wish I could say it was a new understanding altogether but my spirit has rarely learned like that, in leaps and bounds. I grow slowly and deeply and my roots have to push deeper into a thing, a truth or a season or a reality, before I can see it slowly growing in my own life. The thing about beauty is it’s been growing on my heart for the past year and a half and only now can I shape into words how this belief is changing me.

But I don’t have to just believe that beauty will save the world anymore. I’ve heard stories so blatant they spell it out nice and slow for even those as stupid as me. The story I heard this spring was the story of a woman in a choral group that sang old latin hymns. She loved them for their beauty even though she didn’t believe the truth of them. And yet gradually, that beauty became so rooted in her heart that she began to wonder if these words about Christ and saving and hope could actually be true. There were other influences in the gradual renewal of her beliefs, but it began with the hymns of a dead language whose words were very much alive.

Yesterday it came home to me in my own way: I had tucked my toddler in for bed and stepped outside for a walk. We live in the woods, at camp, with other families: there were people who’d hear him if he cried, and I only wanted to walk the quarter-mile loop of the driveway a few times. There were birds singing. A sunset glow was gathering on the opposite hill. Wildflowers were blooming – some I know, like shooting stars and blue flags and golden smoke and alpine bluebells. Even more that I want to learn were pushing their blossoms up in places I didn’t expect, catching me off-guard with perfect tiny white blossoms and surprising fragrances. Last year’s rose hips marked the places where this year’s roses will bloom.

I walked in that wide loop for a long time, just savoring the freshness of the air and the presence of the flowers and the singing of the wind on the tops of the hills. It’s moments like that which give me the ability to go back to being a mama with more gentleness. Walking and solitude and beauty give me the chance to be restored. They save the way I talk to my toddler, or my husband or my friends. They change the way I write, process, imagine. They save the way I see the world, the way I understand beauty and its small saving graces. Yes, beauty will save the world, one wildflower, one tired mama at a time.

There’s hope in this knowledge; when I can’t find or get to beauty, I can know it still exists. It still changes things. It still saves in it’s own small God-made ways. And when I can, it saves me, sends me back to God again in ways that don’t quite happen in a church. Yes, beauty will save the world, sometimes whether we realize it or not.

what can I do to help?

December 20, 2018Posted in UncategorizedTagged 2018, brunch, camp, camp life, camp wife, close friends, community, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, friends, friendship, New Year, scones, year in reviewLeave a comment

The best way I know how to describe my community is that they are helpers. When people have babies, they bring meals. When somebody’s sick, there are offers to babysit, bring over a stash of chocolate or cup of coffee. When it’s just a long day and the kids are, well, kids, somebody’s ready to listen. They just help.

Last Saturday I stood in the kitchen adding one dash of almond milk after another to a batter that still looked too dry. S finished chopping the strawberries. “Anything else I can do?” W heard her ask and turned towards me too; “Yeah, what can we help with? You look busy.” So the strawberries got mixed into the slightly-less-crumbly batter and the teapot was pulled off the shelf I couldn’t reach and we all settled into the living room to enjoy our Christmas brunch.

I would love to summarize our year with pretty thoughts tied in a bow for your advent admiration, tucked under a perfectly-tapered, not-shedding-needles tree. But, life.

We moved, wholly or partially, four times this year. Some of our things are still tucked in the back of a garage, cringing as passing time lessens the possibility that I will label them “necessities”. I was lucky just to find the Christmas lights. Also, please somebody explain the mystery of perfectly operational, gently packed Christmas lights that mysteriously just die in the year between. But we have two working strands and they wrap halfway around the living room and my point is really just that our year was unsettled.

In May we moved up to Eagle Lake Camp for Grant’s job. In August we moved back, and packed up our home. In September we moved out of our house and into flux, and in October we moved into the cottage. I still don’t know where our large skillet is, but the lights are stretched above the windows and the throw blankets are on every piece of furniture and it’s feeling like home now.

But our friends have been even more comforting than the cheery yellow throw blankets we tuck around our feet on cold evenings. They brought us meals when I was sick this Spring. They shared their coffee when we all moved up to camp this summer. They gave a lot in the give-and-take of monitoring our collective kiddos at the staff housing lodge. They loved us and supported us and when I try to think of this year as a whole, they’re in it one way or another.

So, thank you, friends. Thank you for memories, thank you for friendship. Thank you for putting down roots with us, sharing meals with us, wiping up spilled milk and consoling unhappy babies and drinking a quiet cup of coffee with us. Here’s to next year. Here’s to community. Here’s to crumbly scones and hot coffee.

memory

August 18, 2018August 18, 2018Posted in camp life, writingTagged blogging, Cobbler, Colorado, Colorado Springs, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, memories, raspberries, raspberry cobbler, summer, THM, THM dessert, Trim Healthy Mama, wild raspberriesLeave a comment

Today I made raspberry cobbler in a jar. They were the raspberries I picked at Eagle Lake this summer. I wanted to remember.

I picked those raspberries, picked through the rain and the scratches on my calves and the mud. Washed the bugs and the dirt off the berries and learned how to flash freeze them so they wouldn’t stick together all tumbled up in a container later. I learned where the best picking was; behind staff housing, up by Raven’s Craig, down on The Darn, along the road towards the dining hall.

We stopped our strollers along that road, picking two or three berries before we turned around and offered them to the babes. I held them up for Erik strapped on my back, handed them to Addison in her stroller, Abby and Alice running back and forth looking for their own berries. We left staff housing early for lunch, allowing ourselves to get distracted with the picking, offering, savoring. We talked and planned about how we should make jam together. We could get little labels printed with Eagle Lake 2018 and each of us keep a jar.

In eleven minutes the steaming scent of fresh raspberry cobbler will probably tempt my husband away from his audiobook to ask what I made, what smells so good. Remember those wild raspberries, I will say, how bittersweet they were? Taste this.

That’s how I want to remember our summer. I want to take the bittersweet and bring out the wild flavor. I want to transform the memories into happy recollections; there’s no way to erase how hard the summer was but that’s not what I want to do. I just want to frame the memories in the best way; serve them up gently with our thoughts heavy on all the goodness. We need good memories like we need good food.

cliff jumping

August 3, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, courage, writingTagged blogging, cliff jumpers, cliff jumping, close friends, Colorado, courage, courageous, creativity, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, faith, family, friends, Lake Superior, Minnesota, north shore, truthLeave a comment

There is a cliche I’m tempted to use when I try to describe the passing summer: harder than I thought but better than I expected. I think cliches are better expressed in stories. After all, aren’t cliches just familiar sentiments that we’ve chosen the same, typical ways of expressing? But our stories are all different.

I was the girl who camped with her friends instead of going to parties with them. Once we all slept on the lakeshore after gazing in awe at a meteor shower. It rained on us around midnight but we just ducked under our covers and laughed it off the next day when we shook the sand out of our blankets. One July we packed up and drove to the north shore of Lake Superior. We left at 3 am because we didn’t have reservations and we were banking on being there in time to get two non-reservable campsites. It was a gamble, but we were all together in a too-loud pickup truck eating fresh donuts and trying to keep each other awake and we were willing to take the risk.

The nights were cold and the days were foggy and even so the next morning we girls walked up to the boys campsite to see Caleb striding confidently out of the tent in a swimsuit. The rest of the boys trickled out after him, swaggering a bit with their damp towels over their shoulders. The river we camped on was horribly cold for July and even so there was a definite wall of colder water where the river met Lake Superior and somehow all the same, Caleb planned to go cliff jumping.

Sheri calmly declined. There may be a moment when peer pressure has caused Sheri to cave but I have not seen it. Anni and I looked at each other with wide eager eyes. We had no resistance. It was cliff jumping or a slow death of shameful cowardice. We got our swimsuits and followed the boys. We could hear our hearts pounding over the crunch of our flip-flops on gravel so we sang Dive by Steven Curtis Chapman to pump ourselves up and drown our fear.

We hovered on the edge of the gravely ledge while the boys jumped in line. Once, twice each. I looked down; I shook; I wavered. I thought of how cold the water would be. Worth it? And I imagined the adrenaline-filled glory of coming up the steps to my friends cheers. Worth it?

And then I jumped.

The water was harder than I pictured. It stabbed the soles of my feet and stung the undersides of my outflung arms. I fell farther than I imagined: There were deep heavy layers of water above me when I tried to swim back up. The breath I couldn’t breathe in caught in my throat as I tried to push the waves aside, to resurface. But the glory overwhelmed me. When my feet left the rocky soil I felt the wind in my hair. I felt myself falling with helpless joy. I scrambled onto the rough shore visibly trembling; there was an overwhelm of laughing courage inside so strong I barely heard the offered cheers.

Our feet squeaked against our wet flip-flops as we walked back to our tents. We were cliff jumpers.

That is how I would describe this summer. The long, arduous hours I expected were longer, more painful than I thought. They built resentment and frustration. I’m exhausted when I wake up every morning at 6. The weeks of E teething have been impossible. The times I spend with Grant have been rare, interrupted, disconnected, frustrating.

But the beauty has been overwhelming. Our marriage is stronger. We learned that “being in love” can’t carry us; we learned how to fight for each other in cups of coffee and spontaneous sushi dates and saying I’m sorry. I learned to play with Erik more; we read books and play chase and sometimes seek out the other littles to give me a break. The woods that looked like nothing but a dead burn scar this spring have been washed with the magic of wildflower meadows and red raspberries and baby Aspens like a thick green blanket. The close community has shocked and warmed me like the adrenaline and applause when I climbed out of Lake Superior four years ago.

This summer has stung me like hard cold water on my skin and emboldened me like laughing courage shared with old friends. Here’s to the life we create at camp. Here’s to the hard things we couldn’t imagine and the glory we feel and cannot fathom. Here’s to being cliff jumpers.

^ Anni and I, at Lake Superior. 2014.

wild raspberries

July 16, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, parentingTagged Bemidji, berry picking, blogging, Colorado, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, essays, family, learning, memories, nature, parents, raspberries, wild raspberries1 Comment

It was mid-July when I first learned about wild raspberries. We were camping, camping all together on our summer family trip to Bemidji State Park. The hot afternoons we spent out in the boat together, whipping the intertubes in circles and pulling the skiers in straight lines. Cool mornings Mom liked to get us out biking. There were mixed feelings about hopping on our bikes in the midwest humidity, but our motto was “Everybody gets a turn doing what they want.” Mom, Josh, me and sometimes Josiah all wanted to bike.

My parents took the lead and the tail. Mom biked ahead with Josh, competitive nature in full force. I did my best to keep up despite a slight nagging sympathy for Josiah and Kiara, younger legs biking slowly in the back with Dad. We went single-file down the winding paved path; Josh and I weaving side to side and attempting to break each other’s records of Distance Ridden With No Hands. Eventually our family caught up with us, all but Dad and Kiara. I turned around, volunteering to find where they’d gotten hung up. Sitting still at a junction in the trail galled me when we ought to be moving.

Dad was stopped by the side of the trail. Kiara struggled up a hill behind him.

“Dad! What happened?”

“Wild Raspberries,” he said with a sly smile, and popped a red berry in his mouth. His knowledge of the outdoors had identified for him a treasure we all missed; his voice identified the warm pleasure that filled him whenever he spent time in the woods.

“Really? Are they good?” I’d never harvested any fruit out of the wild before.

“Try some.” He handed me one, and bent over to pick more. They were good. I began to pick them with Dad, leaning over with my bike held upright between my legs, the front wheel turning heavily towards the trees. Kiara caught up and sat beside the road, eating the berries we shared with her. Soon the rest of the family trickled back and called us sly names for not telling them about the sweet gems we’d stumbled across.

Every year after that, I paid attention to what month it was when we camped at Bemidji. I found ways to quiz Dad quietly, asking him whether the raspberries would be ripe yet. If they were I hung back from my usual fast-paced riding. I’d race Josh across the bridge, attempt to ride with no hands between the vehicle-prohibiting metal gates on the trail, hold my breath to keep from panting while I tried to be the first one up the hills. But when we came to the large aspen grove, white trees in their haze of golden-green light stretching out between the ferns, I’d drop back – “to check on Dad and Kiara,” I’d explain with a shrug, perhaps just a little too innocent.

We’d spend a few minutes eating all the tangy plump raspberries we could reach from the trail, scheming quietly how long we could stay before the others would turn around to find us and deplete the amount of berries we could each eat.

Grant and I walked around the lake at camp one evening when we first moved up here. He told me again the story of how he and his co-counselors were told to weed the areas between the boulders of the damn, and then suddenly chided when the property manager discovered they’d pulled up not just the weeds, but all the wild raspberries. We laughed together comfortably. I looked down the sides of the damn at the small stiff bushes poking up between stones. The raspberries were certainly coming back well.

The longer I live at camp, the more raspberries I discover. They grow along the trail up to Raven’s Craig, they grow between the boulders that pile high beside the road. Raspberries bloomed in springtime along the walk down to the dining hall and behind staff housing and on the trail that led back to Halfway Meadow. Now they’re ripening.

We walk around the lake again, this time with little Erik on Grant’s back. I linger, slowing down Grant’s long strides across the open back of the damn. There are raspberries to pick. Nostalgia warms me; I put a raspberry in Erik’s mouth. He grimaces with the burst of tang, and then smiles widely around the sweetness. I shape a memory in the sunshine, saving it for us to taste again next summer.

Every time I find a dark red raspberry, ripe and ready to eat, I remember eating those first wild berries with Dad. I hear the excitement that crept into his voice when he taught us about the woods he loved. I remember learning about the trees from him. Mom quizzed us on our trees by tickling our noses with their leaves, making our homeschool learning fun. Dad taught us from the heart of him; there was no tickling, only a deep love of all things wild that made his knowledge gold and transformed the woods into holy ground.

It is mid-July. I try to remember all the places I’ve noticed the rough shapes of raspberry leaves over the spring. I wander back quietly, hoping to find and collect the sweet red memories before everyone else catches up.

embrace your dreams

June 13, 2018Posted in courage, writingTagged Aspens, blogging, Colorado, dreaming, Dreams, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, goals, memories, on this day, writingLeave a comment

“What do you want to do?” Grant asked. He meant for myself; did I want a job, a hobby, more education? We were walking slowly back from the park, me with the hole in my jeans, him carrying our tiny boy in the baby carrier. He asked me again sitting in the oversized blue chair in the corner of the living room, again in the kitchen when we did the dishes together and I wondered about what the fall would bring. He kept asking, sometimes months apart, because I kept not knowing. How long had it been since I knew what I wanted?

“No stretch marks, that would be nice,” I’d joke decrepitating. “To sleep through the night,” with a quiet sigh about waking up to nurse the wee one. “To not wrestle with my insecurity anymore.” “To have the space to think.” “A few hours by myself, no dirty diapers or wiping baby cereal off his chin.” I honestly didn’t know what to dream for, how to dream, what my dreams were. I only knew what they had been once, before I gave up on them and moved on.

We haven’t had that conversation for a few months now. Perhaps we haven’t had the time; Grant is working twelve and fourteen hour days lately since camp is up and running. There are counselors to be trained, schedules to deconflict. And I am happy. I watch the sun creep slowly up over the pines in the morning; I walk up the road to see Pikes Peak dozing in the noon sun; the alpenglow on Raven’s Craig casts the evening in gold before the night moves in like a whisper.

I have space; time. I can breathe again. The dreams are coming back.

“I want to [be] curious. I want to notice things. I want to be creative and resilient. I want to become better and better forever at what I love; parenting, writing, spending time in the outdoors, investing in relationships. I want to follow Jesus well. I want to think original thoughts. I want to work hard, and I want to know how to stop working completely and just play. I want to keep discovering the wildness and beauty God put in me. I also want to eat dinner.”

I wrote those words this afternoon, sipping too-bitter cocoa and staring at the aspens quaking in the gusty wind. I know what I want.

I found this photograph a few hours later on Facebook, popping up in the memories that I looked at on a whim. I remember that photograph. The sun was beaming brilliant and the lilac blooms had given way to full-green waxy leaves. I settled onto the culvert rocks with no flowers to look at, determined to just put down my phone and be for a few minutes. And then this call snagged my attention; I started writing things on my little phone screen, thinking again of all the writing dreams that I had slowly given up on.

Two years ago was not much a time of dreaming. I was sliding into a hard season that would open with the uncontained joy of my wedding. But the seed of dreams was planted. Maybe it took all these two years to poke above the soil. Today feels softly significant for all the joy of this small realization. I know what I want.

crazy days, lovely days

June 4, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, habitsTagged blogging, Colorado, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, home, learning, mountain meadow, mountains, nature, photography, Pikes Peak, truthLeave a comment

The days are crazy here. I may look back on this conclusion someday and wonder what I thought was so crazy about them, but it still seems true now. I live more unplugged, since taking my phone out of the house means losing reception instantly. I play more with Baby E. We play hide-and-seek around and around the large comfy chair in the living room, or wrestling games, or chasing games. We play upstairs on the porch with the others, although Erik is a bit of a loner so far.

We walk downhill to the dining hall once or twice a day (which means uphill back and we mamas all groan the whole way.) When Erik naps I put the monitor on the front patio and walk laps around the driveway to staff housing, checking the monitor every five minutes when I pass through. Sometimes we all walk down to the beach together, or up to the gate to see Pikes Peak. If I’m feeling energetic and adventurous, we’ll hike the “mother loop” which feels 90% uphill, or walk out on the trail towards Halfway Meadow.

There’s a trail up to the Cross I haven’t explored yet, since it’s too steep to take Erik up, or to hike without a radio connection. There’s a trail to the Raven’s Craig where I’ve only discovered the trailhead and the first few yards of the narrow, winding track. There’s a bike track that stretches out past where another trail meets the road. The lake is surrounded by a trail that rides up over the damn. There are burn scars and wildernesses waiting at our doorstep. Overall there’s a lot of walking. I barely drive anywhere.

I’m learning to find beauty in the repetition. When I walk laps around the willow marsh during E’s naps, I look for new wildflowers blooming, or study the few aspens that rise above the willow brush more closely. There are new birdsongs to be heard, new shades of green to be discovered. I try to look with fresh eyes every time I walk around it.

I’m trying to see God the same way, new and deep and beyond what I could ever comprehend, yet always revealing more of himself. I try to look deeper and more closely at the scriptures I’ve read so often. There is more to be found, understood, absorbed, applied – if only I can learn to see it. God is the same yesterday, today and tomorrow but his mercies are new every morning. I cling to these thoughts and passages and look for the new mercies of God in the old, old words he gave us, just like I look for the newness of leafy aspens and blooming wildflowers in the narrow marsh below our front door.

initiate

May 14, 2018May 14, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, courage, writingTagged blogging, Colorado, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, friendship, initiate, initiation, learning, nature, poetry, writingLeave a comment

I am an initiate

starting, but not familiar yet.

In the autumn it was “Hello, we haven’t met,”

but they welcomed me in, fellow Mama, camp Mama.

I floundered and wondered at their conversations

and wished I had history to make a translation, but

I am the initiate.

At Christmas it was “White Elephant” and I laughed

happily until my gift was different and

I laughed bitterly and I knew

I was still the initiate.

In May they said Happy Mother’s Day and I asked

What should I pack? What will I want for a summer at camp?

Then we were traveling

and on gravel roads, I slid and slipped

I still felt like an initiate.

The sun was rising somewhere but the fog kissed my fingertips

beauty comes at me in catched breaths and gasps.

Pine trees hold raindrops in sunshine and glisten

when my footsteps echo the birds stop to listen

I recognize home lights of housing like beacons

the air herself bends around me to receive.

Initiate, maybe, but not uninvited.

seeing

May 11, 2018Posted in adventure, camp life, habitsTagged adventure, Adventure Camp, beauty, blogging, cabin, camp life, Colorado, Eagle Lake, Eagle Lake Camp, earth, God, gratitude, Jesus, kids, learning, light, nature, outdoors, parenting, parents, sky, teaching, truth, writing5 Comments

Yesterday we moved most of our summer things up to camp. The back of the truck was full of boxes, the baby boy full of rice and stew. The higher we climbed up Rampart Range, the higher the anxiety mounted in my own heart. We unpacked, stowing our favorite mugs in the cabinets, tucking away canned tuna and steel cut oats in a cupboard, setting bread and tortillas on top of the fridge.

With each thing I unpacked, the stark reality of our summer at camp took on form. I had known the fridge would be small as but I tucked kefir on the top shelf and then negotiated the almond milk behind it I wondered how I would work with this space. I knew there wasn’t a bookshelf but when I stowed my favorite books behind a charming little end table door, I wondered how I would survive in this literary desert. The windows, larger than I had remembered, were covered in window wells and my heart sank a little more. I had planned for Erik to share our room but when I put him down in the pack’n’play, still unhappy after a bottle of milk, I wondered how much more motherhood I could manage for the day.

I saw the sun shining through a hedge a few days ago. The sidewalk was shadowy and dark but in the gap between the leaves the sun was bright and gold, all the more beautiful for having trickled through the leaves, maybe. And when the sun slips behind the dark-rising mountains in the evening, the colorful rays of evening shine out the more lovely for being ephemeral.

Perhaps that is the way with all beautiful things. I must learn to see them. The moments of glory in parenting will only shine the brighter when I am looking for them, when I have walked through the frustrations. The small closet, the narrow cupboards, the welled windows; these will all become worthwhile when I have looked for the ways that camp life is shot through with light. The same moment the sun sets, the stars begin to appear. When the challenges rise like the dusky mountains in the evening, the soft rays of joy may just become more beautiful.

Look for the light, my friends.