Summers and Cousin Camp
The seasons of 2022 are on the downhill side of summer. In about four weeks, school will resume in many communities, the intemperate weather than many of us have been experiencing will begin to abate, the gardens that we planted in May will bring forth a bounty of vegetables, lawns will begin to go dormant, and we will look back at the whirlwind of our lives and wonder where those “lazy days of summer” went, or if they even exist at all.
As a child, for me, summer was as close to “perfection” as life could be. Baseball, fishing, long “bike-hikes” with friends, the smell of clover and newly swathed hay, the absence of school (read structure), and evenings on the front porch, watching fireflies light up the dusk to an auditory backdrop of a play by play announcer describing a game I loved but had never seen played in person; a situation that wasn’t remedied until I was in graduate school in St. Louis and the bleacher seats in the old Busch stadium cost only a dollar for afternoon games.
My wife, Myra, was an educator. When we met, she was teaching 4th grade, and later she served in a variety of administrative roles, including elementary and middle school principal. She worked extremely hard during the school year, often spending 60 hours a week at school, and when summer finally rolled around, it was her opportunity to unwind a bit, and everyone in the family looked forward to these several months of a slower pace.
My children were both active in a variety of summer activities including baseball and for many years, I coached their respective teams, taking two Babe Ruth teams to the State Tournament where we learned that having a plethora of pitchers was imperative. Losing wasn’t fun, necessarily, but the experience of traveling to different parts of the state and playing against teams we didn’t know well made the experience worthwhile.
Subsequent to my children going into high school, summers looked different. They both had summer jobs, and the spontaneity that allowed us to do things on the spur of the moment, was necessarily tempered by their work schedules, and the easy summer days of hanging out as a family became infrequent.
Fast forward a few years. Both of my children are married and have children. My son and his family live in Alaska, while my daughter and her family live in Minnesota. We travel to Alaska yearly and get to Minnesota several times each year, but it is a rare event when the entire clan can get together.
Due to a variety of circumstances, the likes of which really aren’t worth mentioning, I grew up without having much of a relationship with my cousins. We visited my Ohio cousins infrequently on my mother’s side of the family, and almost never on my father’s. Aside from the several months when my father first enrolled in seminary and was awaiting a student pastorate. and we lived with my aunt and uncle and their kids in Beverly, Ohio, I don’t have many memories of cousins and I’ve always felt a bit of a loss around this.
Consequently, when my grandchildren reached an age where they were old enough to spend a week with their grandparents absent the watchful eyes of their parents, Myra and I began the tradition of “Cousin Camp.” Cousin Camp is a week of joining together on the farm where the four grandchildren (They are all within 5 years of each other in age) can live out the old saying that “A grandparent’s house is where cousins can become best friends.”
Cousin Camp ’22 was a wonderful success, replete with tubing and kayaking in the river, lots of Legos and board games, miniature golf, driving the Polaris, building a stage for the grand finale “Talent show,” whiffle ball games, special treats and the reality that “A cousin a day, keeps boredom away,” cousin bonds were nurtured. Nora (age 9) stated that Jackson (age 10) was her very best friend in the world and always would be. I suspect that Jackson shares a similar sentiment.
Anna (13) and Katherine (14) are good buddies and even though the distance between Alaska and Minnesota is significant, the gift of technology keeps them in touch with one another.
As the children get older, I can foresee a day when their own
busy lives will preclude their ability to come to the farm and join in Cousin Camp, but it wasn’t this year, and according to Katherine, it won’t be next year either. One afternoon, Katherine and Anna and I were on a country drive (Katherine was learning to drive the Jeep) and Katherine mused,
“Hey guess what Grandpa. Next year when I come to Cousin Camp, I’ll have my learner’s permit and I’ll be able to drive here from Minnesota.” Music to this old man’s ears.
Despite the heat, despite the fact that it is only one week, and despite the inevitability of Cousin Camp “no more” in
some future iteration, for the immediate past, the present and at least a few more summers, Cousin Camp on the farm punctuates summer with a giant exclamation mark, and hopefully brings to fruition the notion that “a cousin is a little bit of childhood that can never be lost.”