1 : the state of being homesick : homesickness 2 : a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also : something that evokes nostalgia
The danger of wistfully yearning for a return is that you might fool yourself into thinking that you can travel back in time and relive or (oh God no) change the past. Enter the most beautiful print the world has ever known.
It's hard to bring the magic of Dudley home with you. It's harder than working for your Cub Emblem or Senior Flag because once you leave the campus, your support system of leaders, staff, and campers isn't condensed into forty+ cabins surrounded by the Adirondaks. I spent last weekend cleaning up the Witherbee Theater. To say the building is sacred space is a gross understatement - it holds nearly everything wonderful I've done in the fourteen summers I've lived and worked in Westport, NY.
On my drive home, the nostalgia not just of past summers but of the past forty-eight hours is already eating at my heart! I wish I could go back to Friday night when I walked down the Dudley road and Davo drove up to me blasting some funk/horn tune out of his station wagon; when I met Matt Storey for the first time that evening. I wish I could go to Saturday afternoon when I vacuumed an entire summer's worth of grass out of the stairwell leading up to the office; when Ryan Joyce showed up for lunch. I wish I could go back to Saturday night when Ben Schloat surprised me by showing up for s'mores and a fire; when my sister and her girlfriend broke out guitars and screamed lyrics at the surrounding woods...
There isn't an easy answer, solution or magic machine that can let you go back. But there is an Adinkra symbol. I guess that'll have to do for the time being...
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