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Saturday night our gym was loud enough to feel it in your belly. Sunday afternoon the landsports field had music going, a sprinkler spinning, and the whole camp in team jerseys running between game stations. In between those two, on Sunday morning, everyone walked down to the chapel clearing and sat quietly on log benches, and one girl after another stood up to talk about a breeze on her cheek at bedtime, or the sound of the birds at dawn, or the way it feels when a friend hands you something small. Three all-camp events, each with its own rhythm and feeling of togetherness, punctuating the last few days. And in the middle of them, a story about a gift that was supposed to be nothing at all.

So Hot in There

Saturday night we had a dance with Camp Carolina, or I should say, “dances” because we ran two at the same time, so that the girls could be with boys their own age. Our Juniors and Middlers stayed home and welcomed the younger CCB boys into our gym, where our friend Marcus, DJ Dawg, had his sound and light system ready. The kids jumped and bopped through familiar pop songs and the line dances everybody knows, Cotton Eyed Joe, the Macarena, and such. When the gym got too hot, girls spilled outside for gaga ball or tetherball, hula hooping and jumping rope, until they’d cooled off enough to go back in. Partway through Sarah and Lauren passed out chocolate chip cookies. More fuel for the dancing fun.

Meanwhile the Seniors and Hi-Ups loaded onto buses and vans for the trip to the Camp Carolina gym. Some with glitter on their faces, a few in costumes, for the silly fun of it all, they arrived with true girl-power energy that I think surprised the boys a little. Setting loose a group of 100 teenage girls, dressed and ready to dance, is quite a force. A solid hour of dancing, stopping only for water, sweaty and thrilled the whole way through. On the ride home I heard “so hot in there,” (It was!) and from more than one girl, “still really fun!”

Tiny Threads

Sunday mornings run slower here on purpose. We sleep in a little, eat breakfast in pajamas, clean the cabins, put on uniforms, and walk down to the chapel clearing for our weekly gathering, a time to slow down and reflect together on one shared idea. Over the years the name has grown into an acronym we’re fond of: a Celebration of Happiness, Adventure, Peace, Earth, and Love. Campers do the speaking. They volunteer, they write their own remarks, and the adults mostly sit and listen. This week the theme was gifts and gratitude. Each age group took turns stepping up, one camper or pair of campers at a time to speak about what they were grateful for. Between groups we sang songs about gratitude, like the old Shaker song, “Simple Gifts.”

Camper after camper mentioned little things about life at camp that made them feel grateful. The kitchen staff that makes our delicious meals, the strong bonds of friendship they’ve found at camp, small acts of kindness from people they don’t really know well, wonderful moments in nature, the fun of the activities, and the sense of belonging they feel while at Rockbrook were all mentioned.

A senior camper stood up and told everyone she sometimes struggles with anxiety. She described sitting with a friend on the hill and opening up about this. That friend said she had it too, then wrote down the name of her therapist and handed it over. That was the gift she chose to talk about. A name on a piece of paper. A small thing, but also a really big moment where she felt the love and support of camp deeply.

One senior reached all the way back to the night before, and described being grateful for the cars whizzing past the bus on the ride home from the dance, harmonizing with her friends, and just chatting. Then for the katydids that sing everyone to sleep, and the birds that wake her just before the bell so she has time to say good morning to her cabin mates. Tiny threads in a bracelet, she called them. “Gratitude,” she said, “means caring about the small things in life.”

We finished with Sarah reading The Gift of Nothing, by Patrick McDonnell, a lovely short story about true gifts not always being something material. It describes Mooch, who wants to give his best friend Earl a present, but Earl already has what he needs, so Mooch settles on giving him nothing. The trouble is finding it. He walks every aisle at the store and learns that “nothing” is not for sale. So he goes home, puts nothing in a box, then decides Earl deserves a bigger box. “Now that’s plenty of nothing,” he says. When Earl opens it he says, “there’s nothing here.” “Yeah,” says Mooch. “Nothing but me and you.”

One Step Back

After rest hour the landsports field turned into a festival. The girls had been told to pack a jersey and most had taken it seriously, so the field filled with basketball and soccer and football colors and numbers from every team you can think of. The inflatable skill games drew the longest interest, each one a different challenge: kicking a soccer ball through a hole, threading a frisbee through a slot, hitting a wiffle ball at a target. The two space-themed basketball goals were the hardest of the bunch, with the hoops set about fourteen feet up, which turns a free throw with a regulation ball into a full body effort for most of us. The “sandwich relay” run stacked up hula hoops, a sack race, “ingredients” to gather, and a sprint to the finish.

The water balloon toss perhaps pulled the biggest crowd, partly because it moves fast and partly because everybody knows how it ends. A pair of girls toss, both take a step back, toss again, step back again, and the balloon holds and holds until it doesn’t, usually right in the hands of whoever was reaching out to catch it. At the face painting table the stencils were out, and girls walked away with elaborate geometric designs in three and four colors running across their cheeks and down their arms.

What the girls like best about an afternoon like this is being able to wander. Nine square in the air for a while, then over to the craft table to make a foam finger, then back out to something loud. Plus stopping to pose whenever a camera came by, which is its own event at this point.

By evening the field was packed up and the light was going long across the hill. Somewhere in a cabin tonight a girl will lie down and count the day backwards, and the list will be short and specific. A cookie. A breeze. A friend’s smile. The katydids helping her drift off. Gratitude all the way down.

We opened the third session of camp this morning, and it brought us something we rarely see on an opening day. It rained.

Not a dramatic mountain storm, it was a steady soaking that arrived right as the first cars did and settled in for about an hour, so the whole check-in line ran under umbrellas and pop-up tents while we greeted families, went over health forms, and moved trunks up the hill trying to keep everything dry. Not much later the clouds moved out and left us bright blue skies for the rest of the day. The rest of the morning the cars kept coming, and somewhere in the middle we began to see girls standing up through the sunroofs of their cars, half their bodies out in the sunshine, waving at everyone they passed. That part was entirely ordinary, even expected. These are the girls who have waited the longest, whose session holds off until the end of the summer, who have spent June and most of July watching other kids go to camp. A little rain was not going to slow them down, and it showed.

Arriving Together

We ask families to arrive according to their camper’s age, with certain grades assigned to certain times through the morning. Since our cabin groups are also arranged by age, this means the girls who will be living together roll through the check-in line within the same short window. They notice each other. There’s a good chance the camper in the car ahead is one of your daughter’s cabin mates, and you can watch the recognition happen right there in the driveway. Having the whole cabin group arrive more or less at once is ideal, because they can start setting up together right away, making beds, pushing trunks into place, taping up photos from home, and hanging fairy lights. It’s the fastest way we know to get camp started.

Once the last cars had come up the driveway, the whole camp gathered on the hill for our opening assembly, where we made introductions, learned a couple of songs, and heard from Sarah about a few important things, including what to do when the lightning alarm sounds. Then, hungry and perhaps still slightly damp, we went to lunch.

Baked to a Crispy Crust

Lunch was Rick’s homemade four-cheese mac-n-cheese, baked to a crispy crust, with cool watermelon and the salad bar alongside. It’s so popular it has become our traditional opening day meal, and there are girls who start thinking about it somewhere around the Asheville exit.

Dinner was pizza night, which starts with Rick and his team making the dough from scratch, flour and yeast and oil and salt, then stretching it onto sheet pans tray after tray. They turned out 34 cheese pizzas, 34 pepperoni, and 12 veggie, plus specialty pies for our gluten-free and dairy-free campers so that nobody sits through pizza night eating something else. Even after everyone had stuffed themselves, we had a few leftover slices.

Truly Refreshing

After a shortened rest hour, the Juniors headed out on camp tours and down to the camp store, while the Middlers and Seniors made their way to the lake for their swim demonstrations. Conditions were about as good as Rockbrook Lake gets. The recent rain had warmed the water a little, and under a bright afternoon sun, the lake we politely call “refreshing” was, certainly today, exactly that. Jumping in is still startling, and that first gasp is part of the fun. Our lifeguards are watching for comfort more than speed, checking whether a girl can swim out and back and tread water without worry, which earns her a blue band and the run of the whole lake. One camper climbed out after her demo and told me she’d be happy to get right back in.

Mini Commercials

Line meetings came next, each age group hearing from its counselors and line heads about cabin and line activities, and then we filled the gym for activity skits. These are short presentations by the counselors who teach each activity, mini commercials designed to entice campers into signing up. The paddling crew had a counselor sitting in a kayak in full gear, PFD and helmet and paddle, going nowhere on the gym floor. The craft activities brought the evidence: finished potholders, pottery, dream catchers. The biggest reaction of the afternoon went to the dance instructors, who put on a small show of the styles they teach and closed with a stretch of the Thriller choreography, which got everyone cheering. After dinner came more get-to-know-you games and the first activity sign-up of the session, where each girl selects the four activities she’ll follow during the day. She’ll keep those activities for three days, and then sign up for a new set.

By the time the cabins went dark, the ground was still soft from the morning’s rain and the air had that cool, wet-woods smell that settles in after a mountain shower. Inside, the talking kept going well past when it should have, the way it does on a first night, when there’s far too much energy in a cabin for anyone to fall asleep easily. These girls have waited all summer for this. From the sound of it, they’d tell you it was worth the wait.

The dining hall windows went dark behind hanging sheets, and everyone knew what that meant. Down in the gym, the cast was running through the second act again. Up on the HUP Palace porch, a Hi-Up was working out what she wanted to say at the fire. The final days of a Rockbrook session bring three big gatherings. There’s the Banquet, then the Play, then the Spirit Fire, and what ties them together is that the girls create all three entirely for one another. There are no parents in the seats, no tickets sold, no one to impress who is not already part of this life. Camp spends a month quietly counting toward all three. These are community events, a camp celebrating itself, its friendships, its shared efforts, and the deep bonds formed over weeks together.

RBC in Wonderland

The banquet theme is a secret every time, guarded jealously by the CAs, our ninth graders, who dream it up early and then spend the session quietly unfolding it inside the mysterious “Cabin 9” at the end of the lower line. This time they took us into Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, and they made one lovely decision at the outset: there was no Alice. The idea was that every camper walking through the door would fall into Wonderland herself, the way Alice did in the book. They called it “RBC in Wonderland.”

The dining hall came apart into color. Tweedledee and Tweedledum in red hats topped with little yellow flags, white collars, blue bow ties, yellow shirts and red skirts. A row of playing cards, all of them the Ace of Hearts. Flowers in red tops with roses in their hair and more roses in their hands. A lizard, a dodo bird, a green bird, a caterpillar, a dormouse, a walrus and a carpenter, a Mad Hatter and a March Hare, a Cheshire Cat, two flamingos, and of course a white rabbit, with the King and Queen of Hearts presiding over all of it. The counselors came as Mome Raths, those imaginary creatures from “Jabberwocky” that seem to be mostly hair, eyes, and two brightly colored legs.

The program was a run of group dances, each one belonging to a set of characters: The Tea Party, then The Forest, then a number by the Mome Raths, then a croquet game, and finally everyone together in a dance called Lost in Wonderland. Costumes, food, decorations, music, choreography, and skits, all of it wrapped around this delightfully colorful theme.

The Play

The next day brought Annie, the Broadway musical that debuted in 1977 and has been winning people over ever since. Zoe played Annie. Margo took on Daddy Warbucks, and our counselor Blair made a sharp Miss Hannigan. Campers and counselors filled out all of the other parts, with some songs sung by the whole company and some handed to a single girl standing out front on the edge of the stage. When the cast list went up earlier in the session, the thing worth noticing was that everyone who auditioned got a part, which is how it always goes here. Casting works as an invitation rather than a contest for the best voices, and the girls who accept it spend good chunks of their free time in rehearsal, learning lines and harmonies from each other.

Between the acts came the dances. The Juniors, the Middlers, and the Seniors each took the stage with a performance of their own, which meant that a good portion of camp was either in the show or waiting in the wings to be, and the rest of us sat out front cheering for our friends. One number quieted the room. Three pairs of dancers took the floor to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” each pair an older girl or a counselor moving alongside a younger camper. “Well, I’ve been ‘fraid of changin’,” the song goes, “’cause I’ve built my life around you.” And then the line that got everybody. “Even children get older, and I’m gettin’ older, too.”

The Spirit Fire

The Spirit Fire gathers us together again, this time at Vesper Rock dressed in our red and white uniforms. It’s a closing campfire of songs and speeches with a candlelight procession around the lake. The name points to the “Spirit of Rockbrook” and the sense of kindness, caring and community that defines camp life. Campers and staff members alike take turns giving short speeches reflecting on their experience over the course of the session. A striking number of them described how they arrived shy, or a little nervous, or unsure they would fit in, and somewhere in the weeks that followed they relaxed and found themselves connected to more people than they could count. Arm in arm and shoulder to shoulder on the benches, we were reminded about how much we’ve grown at camp and how much Rockbrook has become an important part of our lives.

There’s some sadness mixed in, particularly among the girls old enough to know that this has been their last summer as a camper. Rebecca, in her ninth year, told us that before writing her speech she signed her name in big red letters on the wall of the Hi-Up cabin, then walked down to the J1 cabin to find the signature she left there almost a decade ago. It’s still legible, in slightly sloppier handwriting, across from the names of two girls who are still her best friends. She talked about her journals, and about wanting to read them again in twenty years when her memory has gone fuzzy. What she wants back most is the small stuff. “More importantly,” she said, “we’ll read about the little things, the small moments, and the memories made in between the lines.” Late-night dining hall chats. A spontaneous evening at Castle Rock watching the sun go down in a sea of orange fog. Birthday cake eaten in the walk-in until their stomachs ached. “Sometimes I wish camp wasn’t as meaningful or memorable,” she admitted, “because maybe it wouldn’t hurt so bad saying goodbye.”

Long after the fire burned down and we sang “Day is Done” for the last time this session, the girls, back in their cabins, seemed noisier than you’d expect for a sad night. Screen doors banging, somebody still humming a song, a burst of almost quiet laughing from a dark cabin, a counselor asking without much conviction for everyone to settle down. With the sounds of the forest, the gurgle of the creek, and the chirping of nighttime frogs and crickets, we ended our day. We’ve spent good solid weeks building to these three gatherings, each one a celebration of the community these girls have created together.

If you take the time to scroll through the whole photo gallery each day, rather than relying only on the facial recognition feature to find your daughter, you will eventually come across a photo that’s puzzling. Girls tangled together in some contorted pose. A swimming spot you don’t recognize. A kid in unfamiliar gear, or standing next to a pony, or grinning in front of a rock face that’s clearly nowhere near her cabin. “What is going on?” is the natural question. A photo catches a single second, and most of these snapshots belong to a longer story you can’t easily see. So let me take a handful of this week’s photos and fill in what’s around them.

Start with the featured photo at the top of this post: five girls, ice cream cones in hand, all smiles, with the Dolly’s trolley parked behind them and the hillside lodge farther in the background. Nobody saw that one coming. After lunch on Friday, the trolley from Dolly’s, the beloved ice cream stand at the entrance to the Pisgah Forest, rolled into camp as a surprise for everyone. It was a welcome sweet treat on a warm afternoon, and a happy jolt of surprise on an ordinary Friday.

Then there’s the circle of senior girls holding hands on the Landsports field, one of them halfway through a hula hoop. That was cabin day, when each cabin group dreams up its own adventure for the afternoon, and the Seniors settled on a slate of relay games. In this one, the girls hold hands in a circle and race a hula hoop all the way around it, which means each girl has to step, wiggle, and fold her whole body through the hoop without ever grasping it. The contortions this requires are hilarious, and the photo catches one mid-wiggle. They ran a three-legged race too, plus a sponge-and-bucket water relay and an egg and spoon relay. The photo shows the twist. The laughing you’ll have to imagine.

The unfamiliar swimming spot is a place we call Mermaid Cove, and the girls wading in it are a junior cabin that hiked out to it for their cabin day adventure. It sits along Dunn’s Creek below Rockbrook Falls, and offers a little waterfall dropping into a sandy-bottomed pool, a giant rock face with an overhang rising on one side and the deep forest leading back to camp on the other. Dappled sunlight comes through the trees in the midafternoon, and the water stays cool enough to feel perfect on a warm summer day. The girls can wade right in and play. Some spots at camp feel found rather than built, almost magical really, and this cove is one of them.

Other photos come from farther afield, so it’s worth explaining how trips work at Rockbrook. Beyond the in-camp activities each camper has as part of her regular day, the outdoor adventure staff announces special optional trips most days at breakfast and lunch, trips like rock climbing, kayaking, rafting, hiking, backpacking, and canoeing. One might be a half-day hike or a full day of rock climbing. It could mean hiking to a view, romping through a creek, visiting a nearby swimming hole, or a trip up to the cave under Dunn’s Rock (the “Nest”) for some hammock time. You just never know what will be announced. And because these trips are extra, they present each girl with a real choice: is she willing to skip riflery and tennis tomorrow morning to go rock climbing instead? There always seem to be girls ready to say yes, especially this session.

That’s how a group of senior girls ended up canoeing the French Broad on a two-day, fifteen-mile paddle from Mills River to Asheville. This section is quite wide, and a long stretch runs through the Biltmore Estate, with no houses or development visible from the river. You can even spy the mansion itself from the water in a couple of places. We have accounts of Rockbrook campers paddling this stretch of river back in the 1930s! The girls reported perfect sunny weather the whole way, and the trip ended with a celebration late lunch at a food truck in Asheville. Fifteen miles of paddling earns a good lunch.

The girls in another photo are Middlers who were on a backpacking trip this week. They carried everything themselves, tents and food and water, and hiked about a mile and a half into the forest to set up their campsite not far from the Davidson River. Then they packed a dinner and kept climbing, up to the top of John Rock to eat it while the sun went down. The light gets better and better as it sets up there, shining across the valley onto Looking Glass Rock. It’s easily one of the best hiking views in the Pisgah National Forest.

And the pony carrying that young rider is Zoey. All of our horses have names, of course, and each has a distinct personality, but Zoey is something of a princess at the barn and one of the most popular animals at camp. She’s a Welsh cross pony who has been part of Rockbrook, and of Free Rein, the therapeutic riding program we host during the school year, since about 2018. She loves working with kids and teaching them how to ride, and when a skilled higher-level rider is small enough to ride her, she can even do a little jumping. Zoey has been teaching girls to ride for more summers than many of our campers have been coming to Rockbrook.

Every one of these photos holds more than it shows. Behind the silly pose is a cabin adventure, behind the unfamiliar river is a choice a girl made at lunch, behind the ice cream cones is a surprise the whole camp shared, and behind the pony is eight years of patient teaching. I wish we could somehow capture even more. So when a photo in the gallery leaves you wondering what’s going on, take it as a good sign. It means your Rockbrook girl is in the middle of something that only happens thanks to the richness of camp life. Tonight the girls who paddled past the Biltmore and the girls who wiggled through hula hoops are back on their cabin porches, trading these stories while the creek runs by in the dark. The photos give you a glimpse. The stories are coming home with her.

The first cars were waiting at the gate before we even opened it this morning. Inside them sat smiling, excited girls who have been anticipating this day all summer long, some of them returning to a camp they already love, others arriving at Rockbrook for the very first time. Today was opening day for our July Mini 2 session, and because these campers are all Juniors and Middlers, things got started early, with check-in at the barn beginning around 8:30am. When each car finished with the office folks and the nurses and drove up into camp, a crowd of counselors met everyone jumping up and down, cheering wildly for whoever was inside. You could watch the nervousness on a new camper’s face dissolve into a grin before she even opened the car door.

Organizing the arrival by age works beautifully. In addition to minimizing waiting in line, cabin groups show up at very similar times, which means counselors can greet every camper personally and then gather the whole cabin to set up bunks together. Within minutes, each girl is making her bed next to the girls she’ll be living with, already chatting, already comparing hometowns and favorite activities. I know this quick drop-off can be a little frustrating for our alumnae moms, who would love to walk around camp and reminisce. After all, this place holds their memories too. But over the years we’ve found that a swift, cheerful goodbye is a real gift to the campers themselves, freeing them to fall in step with cabin life right away, while a lingering farewell tends to slow that settling down. The counselors know just what to do from there. By mid-morning, the new girls looked like they’d been here for days.

Meanwhile, an Ordinary Sunday

For the four-week full-session campers, this was a regular Rockbrook Sunday, which is to say a wonderfully slow one. They wandered into breakfast in their pajamas for the leisurely meal that Sunday mornings call for, complete with the donuts that have become a tradition around here. After some free time, the Hi-Ups led the flag raising ceremony, and then everyone walked down for Chapel, where this morning’s theme was Nature, a fitting subject for a camp so immersed in it. An assembly on the hill followed, and then came Rick’s famous mac and cheese lunch, gloriously cheesy and satisfying, always a favorite.

A little rainstorm brushed up against us during rest hour, cooling off the warm afternoon, and its timing could not have been better. The rain stopped right as we were ready to kick off the afternoon’s all-camp special event.

Jersey Day

The girls knew this one was coming, so many of them came prepared, having packed colorful team jerseys of every kind: basketball, soccer, football, you name it. We filled the landsports field with game stations and called the whole thing “Jersey Day.” With music playing and a yellow giraffe sprinkler spinning away, girls zoomed from station to station, trying a sack relay, joining a massive nine square in the air game, cornhole, several basketball games, a wiffle ball station, and a frisbee game. There was face painting and temporary tattoos, nachos and chips for snacking, and a craft table where girls could decorate foam fingers however they liked. The whole field looked like the happiest, most chaotic sporting event ever held.

Afterward we opened the lake, both for the arriving Middlers to take their swim demonstrations and for everyone else to cool off after all that running around. Lately it’s become a thing for girls to do tricks off the diving board, inventing poses mid-air before plunging into the water. Maybe it’s always been a thing. Either way, with a camera nearby, there seems to be no end to their creativity.

Dinner was hamburgers with all the fixins, seemingly unlimited pickles, assorted potato chips, salad, and fresh blackberries. Then the girls selected their next set of camp activities, the four-per-day schedule they’ll follow for the next three days before getting the chance to choose again.

Settling In

As the evening arrived, camp split into two happy scenes. The new Mini 2 campers gathered in the lodges for get-to-know-you games, Middler cabins in one lodge and Juniors in another, learning names and laughing at the kind of silly games that turn strangers into cabinmates. Meanwhile, the full-session campers headed to the gym for movie night and a showing of High School Musical, a fitting cap to Jersey Day, since it tells the story of a basketball star who ends up singing in his school’s musical. It carries a nice message for kids, that things go better when you have the courage to be your true self.

Walking back in the dark after the movie, I could hear the clatter of the girls getting ready for bed along the cabin lines. It’s a distinctive and pleasing sound: girls chattering to each other, giggles as bedtime routines unfold, and the occasional scream from someone seeing a “giant bug” of some sort. Lights and sounds along the lines and quiet darkness everywhere else in camp. I thought about how quickly campers begin to feel at home here. Even for those girls who just arrived with a few butterflies this morning, somewhere between the dining hall songs, Jersey Day excitement, and time at the lake, they seemed to belong here. Easy, and in just one day.

The first thing we heard was the trumpets. Two of them, bright and brassy, floating out through the camp just as the first free swim period was winding down, and for a few seconds nobody could quite tell what was happening. As the girls followed the sound, now clearly coming from the dining hall, they were excited and surprised to see four musicians standing on the porch, dressed head to toe in the ornate charro suits you picture when you imagine mariachi, dark jackets with rows of silver buttons down the sleeves and wide bow ties in a deep, fitting red. Two of them played trumpets. A third sang and also played an enormous round-backed bass guitar called a guitarrón, and the fourth strummed a vihuela, a small five-stringed cousin of the guitar. A real mariachi band, Mariachi International, had come to Rockbrook! We’ve done this only once before, years ago, and today the surprise turned out to be every bit as fun as we’d hoped. That sound of trumpets across the hill was a call to gather, and gather we did.

The reason we were all streaming toward the dining hall in the first place was already waiting inside, and it was worth every step. This was tamale day, and around here, tamale day is a big deal. Once each summer, and only once, Rick and his friends in the kitchen set aside several days to make authentic corn tamales completely from scratch. It takes time, care, and plenty of willing hands. They roast and shred the chicken, soak the dried corn husks until they soften, cook down a deep red Guajillo chili sauce, and mix the masa, a paste of finely ground corn, lime, oil, and stock, until it is just right. Then, one by one and entirely by hand, each tamale is spread and filled (some with cheese and some with chicken) and folded into its husk pocket before being layered into enormous pots and steamed. When you need a thousand of them to feed the whole camp, you begin to understand why it takes three days. Part of the fun of eating them is the unwrapping, peeling back the warm husk to find the savory middle, a small first for the many girls who had never tasted a true tamale before.

Then the band came inside, and lunch turned into something uniquely fun and festive. The girls were up out of their seats within minutes, clapping along and inventing dance moves, counselors spinning them in circles, and before long the entire dining hall had fallen into the goofy, synchronized joy of the Macarena, a few hundred hands turning and hips swiveling more or less together, grins as wide as they could go. The band played their classics, like “La Cucaracha,” and then they surprised us with a mariachi rendition of Johnny Cash’s “Ring of Fire,” and a version of “Rocky Top” that had us singing along. You could see the delight on everyone’s faces as we danced and clapped to every song.

After lunch, one of our counselors found me to say that she’d been a camper here the last time a mariachi band came to Rockbrook. She still remembers that day, all these years later, one of the bright fixed points from her childhood. It’s not every day you enjoy a lunch of warm, fresh tamales with a mariachi band! I suspect some of the girls dancing this afternoon will remember today just the same, a trumpet floating up the hill and a whole camp eager to join the fun of a mariachi lunch.

Sunday mornings at Rockbrook move at a gentler pace, with time to sleep in a little, enjoy a relaxed breakfast, and then gather as a whole community in the woods for Chapel. This week the Middlers led it, and the theme they chose was “Sunshine.” One by one, girls who had volunteered stood up to say what sunshine means to them. Some talked about the actual sun, the warmth and light that makes everything grow. Others talked about a different kind of sunshine, the feeling certain people give you just by being around. One girl shared a line from Winnie-the-Pooh: “If you’re lucky, you’ll find a few who make the world feel like sunshine, even on an ordinary day.” Sarah read a story about a girl named Elsa who tried again and again to carry sunbeams indoors to her grandmother, whose room never caught the light, only to learn that she had been her grandmother’s sunshine all along. It was a sweet, thoughtful morning. The girls sang “Here Comes the Sun,” and we all walked out of the woods a little warmer.

By the afternoon, things were considerably less contemplative. When we rang the bell after rest hour, the girls came pouring down to the landsports field in their swimsuits, and we handed out about 150 cans of plain white shaving cream. This was our special all-camp event for the day, a Rockbrook tradition I’ve written about many times: the shaving cream fight. Within five minutes the field was a tangle of shrieking, slipping, foam-covered girls. Foam mohawks, foam beards, foam handprints planted squarely between shoulder blades, the occasional “six pack” drawn on bellies. The slip-n-slide added its own layer of mayhem. The laughter out there is what erupts from unmistakable joy.

Thinking about it later, I realized part of its exuberant power may be that it gives girls a brief vacation from perfectionism. Commonly today, children feel a very real pressure to get things right— the right grades, the right performance, the right look, the right response to whatever the group seems to expect. You can sometimes sense that pressure humming underneath how they move through the world.

A girl who feels she must get everything right is always performing, even in ordinary moments. A simple conversation can become something to avoid because it might be “awkward,” or because she might think, “I won’t know what to say.” Studies of perfectionism in young people often point to the same worry underneath it: the fear of making mistakes and the dread of being judged. Sadly, the usual escape, more time online, only makes things worse— another audience, another review. Living under the bright light of perfectionism is exhausting for a kid.

Here is what a shaving cream fight offers that otherwise seems rare in a child’s life: there is no way to do it well. There are no teams, no score, no technique, no judges, and no outcome to measure or worry over. The whole point is to end up as ridiculous as possible. The writer G.K. Chesterton once quipped that anything worth doing is worth doing badly, meaning it’s better to jump in imperfectly than to wait for conditions you can’t control. A shaving cream fight goes even further… it can only be done badly. There’s really nothing to get right, so there’s actually nothing to get wrong either. You might be covered in foam, but all that watchful, self-critical machinery suddenly has nothing to grab. Come to a shaving cream fight and you can see it slip right off.

So if self-monitoring, that constant internal commentary of “how am I doing and what do they think of me?”, feeds a subtle anxiety, then a shaving cream fight provides relief because it makes self-monitoring impossible. Your attention is pulled entirely outward, toward the friend you’re stalking with a fat handful of foam, toward the ambush forming behind you, toward the counselor who somehow ended up with a full white wig. And because every single person on that field looks equally crazy, the fear of being judged collapses on the spot. There’s no time to work up any worry, either. The fight starts the instant the first can spurts, before anyone can stand at the edge wondering whether she’s ready. Anxiety feeds on delay and evaluation, and a shaving cream fight starves it of both. What rushes in to fill that space is joy.

That Sunday morning in Chapel, the Middlers reminded us that some people make the world feel like sunshine, even on an ordinary day. By evening, rinsed off with the water hoses and heading back up the hill for dinner, these Rockbrook girls had done exactly that for each other. Every girl was good enough— gloriously, drippingly good.

Instead of the rising bell ringing, hoofbeats came pounding up the cabin lines this morning. Riders decked out in red, white and blue, their horses just as dressed up with ribbons and paint, clopped along yelling “The British are coming! The British are coming!” Still in their pajamas, girls tumbled out of their cabins and made their way to the hill, hair in every direction, blinking at horses in the early light. I love this tradition even after all these years I’ve watched it, if only for the two seconds of pure confusion on a new camper’s face when she realizes those are, in fact, horses outside her window.

On the hill, small red, white and blue BombPops were waiting for everyone, cold enough to finish waking up whatever the horses hadn’t already startled out of them. Then came the more solemn turn of the morning: the Hi-Ups raised the American flag, and the whole camp recited the Pledge of Allegiance and sang “America the Beautiful” together. It’s a strange, lovely sequence when you stop to think about it: Revolutionary War references, an unexpected sugary treat, and then all our voices finding the same note before breakfast. Only camp could make all three feel like they belong in the same five minutes.

At Rockbrook, the 4th of July is a sort of compounded celebration. Every day at camp is already a celebration with singing at meals, cheering at activities, the small triumphs everyone shares out loud. On the 4th, we kick it up further and paint all of that red, white and blue— bright colors poured straight into the celebrating that was already well underway. It’s one long, sanctioned invitation for everybody to be as joyfully ridiculous as they can manage, together, with the friends they’ve made so far this session.

By the time everyone reached the dining hall for breakfast, the decorations were in place: posters, streamers, and red-white-and-blue tablecloths turning every table into its own colorful parade. And it was then time to show off the costumes. One counselor arrived in a full Founding Father costume, powdered wig and long coat included, looking like they’d wandered in from 1776. Marston, our staff director, went a different direction entirely and became the Statue of Liberty for the day— green from head to toe, paper torch held high, playing the part with total conviction. Elsewhere, faces were painted into full American flags, headbands and beaded necklaces multiplied by the hour, and more than one camper had rigged herself a flag cape for the occasion. By mid-morning, it was hard to find anyone who hadn’t found some way to dress for the holiday.

The morning itself kept to its regular schedule of activities— archery, riding lessons, weaving, the usual rhythm of a Rockbrook day. What made it different was everywhere you looked: flashes of red, white and blue scattered across every activity area, a Founding Father wandering past the climbing tower, a green-painted Lady Liberty checking in on the schedule. Camp doesn’t need much of an excuse to feel festive, but on a day like this, the ordinary and the ridiculous ran right alongside each other, compounded for full effect.

Lunch on the Hill

Lunch gave us a picnic on the hill, plates balanced on laps, sun and shade on the grass with the mountains off in the distance. Rick and his kitchen crew had barbecue chicken and barbecue meatballs going, plus a barbecue tofu for anyone who wanted it, alongside corn on the cob, homemade coleslaw and potato salad, cornbread, and watermelon— enough food that nobody left the hill still hungry. To drink, cans of Cheerwine, kept cold in the creek since morning, made their way into everyone’s hands, a treat we save for days exactly like this one.

An Afternoon of Choices

After Rest Hour, the schedule opened into an afternoon of choice activities. At 3:00 pm, about fifty campers and counselors laced up for the ninth annual Betsy Ross Two-Miler, a running loop out through the camp woods. Afterwards, everyone moved between whatever activity option caught their interest: tie-dying socks red, white and blue, embroidering bandanas in needlecraft, painting a 4th of July banner for the dining hall, or wading into the creek for basket making and watercolors. Down at the lake, teams raced through watermelon relays, while archers aimed at balloons taped to their targets, and over at riflery, paper targets gave way to empty soda cans. At the land sports field, campers turned water guns on each other with more enthusiasm than accuracy, and a badminton tournament ran alongside the regular tennis matches at the courts.

Threaded through all of it was a running bingo game, cards filled in by tracking down the right person or scene: someone wearing 4th of July socks, someone with a full flag painted on her face, a camper from Washington, D.C., three people who weren’t from the United States at all.

Pie, Twilight, and Fireworks

As dinner wound down (which was a fantastic meal of homemade lasagna, salad and bread), six counselors gathered at a table on the hill for a pie-eating contest. With their hands behind their backs, faces first into the tins, and the whole camp gathered around to watch and cheer them on, they did everything they could to finish their pies. There is something enthralling, and admittedly a little gross, about watching someone disappear face-first into pie filling. But the uproarious cheering kept everyone going, and soon, to everyone’s relief, there was a clear winner to congratulate. Congrats, Hayley!

As the sky started to dim, campers and counselors filled up the hill again, this time for a dance party that carried straight from twilight into full dark, glow sticks cracked and swinging, music loud enough to pull everyone onto their feet. Once it was good and dark, around 9:30 pm, the fireworks began, and two hundred girls who’d spent the whole day being loud and silly, so freely celebrating, cheered and sang along to each colorful blast in the sky.

When the last firework had faded and the smoke cleared over the lake, all that extra color from the day, the face paint and glitter, was beginning to fade too, ready to be washed off before bed. But underneath, something more lasting remained, something true about every full day of camp: two hundred girls walking back to their cabins in the dark, glow sticks dim around their wrists, a little more attached to each other than they had been that morning. That part of our days doesn’t wash off.

Right after lunch, the cast list for Annie Jr. went up outside the dining hall, and for a few minutes there was no other news in camp. Everyone who auditioned found her name attached to a part. And there are a lot of parts to this show. Think of the orphans! Everyone seemed happy with their parts, smiling and chattering all the way to rest hour.

By afternoon, the news of the day had moved on to Cabin Day, our Wednesday afternoon break from camp’s usual rhythm. Most days, campers build their own schedule out of dozens of activities, choosing four and following whatever interests them most. On Cabin Day, that scatter comes back together as each cabin group makes a plan together for the whole afternoon.

Down on the Farm

Four Junior cabins started their Cabin Day with a sweet stop at Dolly’s before heading out to Further Up Farm, where the Manner family was waiting with a flock of chickens, a couple of ducks, and a turkey named Albuquerque who seemed to know he was the main attraction. Campers waded into the creek to mine for treasure, gathered wildflowers for arrangements bound for the dining hall tables, and spent a long, unhurried stretch getting to know the farm’s animals up close.

Soda Dives at the Lake

Back at camp, a handful of cabins gathered at the lake for soda dives, a Cabin Day classic that never gets old. Someone tosses a few cans to the bottom, and cabinmates take turns diving down after them. Whoever comes up with a soda in hand gets to relax and enjoy it, cold and fizzy, while the rest of the cabin explores the water further. Yes, at the end of the summer when we drain the lake (something we do each year), we always find a few elusive cans at the bottom.

Treasure Around Camp

Other cabin groups spent the afternoon on a pirate-themed scavenger hunt, dreamed up by their counselors. Clues were scattered across camp, and campers collected gold coins along the way before landing in the dining hall for a well-earned bowl of cabin-made Puppy Chow.

Sprinklers and Sunshine

Down at the land sports field, sprinklers ran and water balloons flew, a good defense against the heat of the day. A spray of water, whether from a sprinkler or a well-aimed balloon, feels great on a beautifully clear afternoon.

Hot Dogs and Sliding Rock

Dinner brought the whole camp back together for an American classic, hot dog night! We’re starting to get into the spirit of the 4th of July around here. The HUPs had a great time thinking of a few “American” songs to sing in the dining hall. S’mores bars closed out the meal, and not long after, the Middler cabins climbed onto buses bound for an evening at Sliding Rock, which is always a blast.

It’s easy to look at a day like this and think it’s a little crazy— chickens and gold coins, fizzy sodas and flower arrangements, and a turkey with an extra large name. I suppose in a way it is, but it’s also girls feeling right at home in the middle of it, finding a place for themselves no matter what’s happening next.