I am sitting in what they call The Enchanted Grove. There is a swarm of insects swirling—not buzzing—around my head.  Strange as it sounds , they do not bother me in the least, but more so, they add another degree of sharing to the experience.  The Enchanted Grove is a small patch of woods in the middle of a field, full of popple, birch, black cherry, and some long ago wilded apple trees growing in and around a good size granite boulder—around which my daughters built a small deck last year out of pine slabs discarded from an old mill they have here. “Here” is Windsor Mountain International Camp where we have been coming as a family the last few years: Me as “enrichment staff;” my older kids as campers; and the three little ones and Denise as honorary and beloved guests.  There is a magic here.  Our old Bluebird motorhome looks more a part of the landscape than a thirty year old beauty of steel and chrome.  As much as anywhere else on earth I feel I belong here.  We belong here. Everyone needs to belong somewhere.

    I look back on my life with thankfulness.  In sum there is nothing I regret and nothing I would wish to change if it would alter in any degree the here and now. If I could excise out the idiocies, the hurt, the profligacy and the inane without mortally wounding the core of who I am and the essential beauty of this moment, I would do so a thousand times over—only a fool or a saint would do otherwise.  My life has always been a confluence of opportunity and willingness, much of it down the road not taken, much of it proudly and stubbornly iconoclastic, but the greater irony is that I am here now after traveling the oft taken road--the long beat path of marriage, family, friends and common labor--and it feels (and is) more rich and real than any of the dreams I conjured in my youthful adventures.  No doubt I use my stories to entertain, not out of wistfulness but because I am acutely aware that the well of memory is more important to the present than to the past. I didn’t always realize that; I do, now; and that in itself is thanksgiving enough.

    I have seven beautiful, wild and unadorned children who run and play and fight and need to be told a hundred times to quiet down in their tent at night. I have an equally beautiful (there is no better word) strong, and loving wife who intuitively understands that family is intertwined and nurtured by a common experience; who knows in a quiet look what and who needs mending and what and who needs unraveling and what and who needs to be left alone to heal in the balm of contemplative time; and more than anyone I have ever met she knows and maps the charted and uncharted majesty of marriage, friendship and motherhood.  She knows that this camp is but another piece of the mosaic we constantly bring to the forward--this shared journey mentored to the next generation!

    This is but stolen time—and I know enough of the cruelty of time to live solely in words—so I will head out to find Denise and the kids who are probably making their way back through the now darkened camp in a game of flashlight tag and dibs on tent space. The moon tonight will be the most beautiful they will ever have the chance to see—a full summer moon sparkled with fireflies and memory, family and community. 

Yes, this is where we belong.