Camp Tuck-Me_in

When we were small, it was a boy's scout camp with the coolest Indian name. Kee-sha-wa. I used to love to say it. The boys stayed in tents for the weeks that they spent there. They sleeping bags on the ground. My big brothers went there. They brought home arrowheads and things they had carved with knives. The boys swam in the Illinois River.

The boys' camp sounded so much more exotic than the camp I went to for a week, Tuc-a-batch-ee, which to me said Camp Tuck-Me-In -- where the girls go to learn how to throw like a girl. The camp itself reinforced my concept -- we slept in cabins and swam in a pool. I always wondered what it would be like to stay at the boys' camp. After all, I read The Hardy Boys, not Nancy Drew.

Finally I got my chance, they turned the camp into a bed and breakfast. Wouldn't you know? My friend and I got a nice cabin-like room over the old "pool house," to the pool the boys never used. At least, I got to sit out on the deck under the stars and imagine sleeping there as a kid. It was closer to Camp-Tuck-Me-In. We were in a tiny house -- kitchen, living room, jacuzzi, and feather bed.

And then . . . at 4a.m. as I sat out on the deck. I heard a noise. It didn't sound like deer, or a dog, or any familiar creature. But surely it had to have been.

Right then I thought Camp Tuck-Me-In was the right place for me after all.

--me strauss Letting me be