Six Weeks.

Six weeks consists of 42 days. That’s 1,008 hours. Or 60,480 minutes. 3,628,800 seconds - give or take a few. No matter how big the numbers get as you begin to consider six weeks in terms of small measurements of time, six weeks will always be too short, and go by too fast.

Six weeks ago our summer was just finishing, we were back in Toronto. We were sitting alone in our rooms, wondering how once again we were going to make it through the next ten months of our year. As solelimnicks, we stumble absentmindedly through home, school, and all the in between. We live ten months just to make it to those six weeks of camp.

As I sit here in my room, I am contemplating the notion of time. It has been six weeks since we got off the buses sad and scared of what the months to come would have in store for us. Terrified because we had just left our little bubble of safety, our heaven. We had spent six weeks forgetting what the real world was like, how to act in it, and now we were thrust back into it, attempting to adjust as though we had stepped out of the darkness into the bright light. We had gotten used to those little nuances that are Camp Solelim. We forgot what it was like to be alone. We never once had to shower by ourselves. A simple boring part of personal hygiene at home becomes a time filled with singing and talking at camp. We slept bed touching bed with some of our best friends. If we woke up in the middle of the night, we had but to simply roll over and find that there was no reason to be afraid, that a friend was there for you if you needed them. It was completely acceptable to wear pajama pants in public every day if you felt that’s what you wanted. Showing up at breakfast when you still hadn’t brushed your hair or your teeth didn’t make you any different from at least half the table you chose to sit with.

It has been six weeks since I can remember watching the sunrise for the first time in my four years at Solelim. Since stepping off the buses and watching everyone disperse as slowly as possible to find their parents, or as fast as they could for that shoulder to cry on. Six weeks since we loaded up the car with our trunks, drawers and duffels, bringing them home to be emptied. Camp sheets and towels packed back into the trunk that would not move from its spot in the basement for another ten months. Drawers filled with those netted laundry bags, the shoes I knew I wouldn’t wear until camp, my dry sack, and a couple of power-bars. My paddle has been hung up in its holder on the wall. From my bed, I can faintly see the scratches that I know most of which came from Killarney this past summer. My Iton is on the shelf with all the others I have from my camping career. The songs of the summer have been downloaded, played, and replayed on my iTunes and my iPod. My bracelets have slowly but surely been removed one at a time from my wrists, but a few still hang on. Any colour I might have had is fading, and freckles are beginning to disappear from their place on my skin.

Six weeks goes by fast, and a lot happens in such a short amount of time. Six weeks from now the weather will have changed. The temperature will be considerably lower than it is right now. The trees will be almost, if not completely through their process of shedding their leaves. Summer will truly be just a distant memory. But hey, there are only six-and-a-half more six week periods until camp…