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Giulietta

Helping others find their true genius.

Challenger of assumptions. A believer in speaking one's truth. Karaoke queen. Essayist. Pianist. Painter. Explorette. Lover of animals, trees, travel, dark chocolate, Torch music and lending others a helping hand or two ... ...

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Summertime & The Livin' Was Easy

Giulietta

Does anyone remember seeing reruns of The Time Tunnel, a 60’s TV showing starring a very cute James Darrin?  Each episode James and his fellow time traveler buddy, Robert Colbert, stepped into this psychedelic tunnel and hurtled back into the past or forward into the future accompanied by a funky soundtrack.

If Disney offered a time tunnel ride that could take you back to any time in your life, where might you go?

For me, it would be any of the three summers I attended Camp Marlyn in Andover, NH. Along with seven other girls, I semi-roughed it in a cabin nestled against Bradley lake for eight magnificent weeks. We didn’t have TVs, phones or radios, just our imaginations cultivated by the loving embrace of tall white pines, our natural inclinations to laugh at anything and everything, and our emerging adolescent hormones. Sure, you could find the emotional scuffles that go hand and hand wherever groups of young girls live in tight quarters, but the magical moments, the ones you look back on wistfully, the ones you didn’t know were perfect until they passed, watched over us like guardian angels.

One time a bus load of us went to a summer fair where we were ordered not to go anywhere near a tent with a sign out front that said “Freak Show.” Of course, I was drawn to the show like a bee to honey and tiptoed over to the side of the tent where I slowly lifted up the flap. I screamed in horror and took off running like a girl possessed when I saw what I thought I saw: a two-headed cow. That’s what I got for going where no Camp Marlynite ever went before.

Probably my favorite times were the “Late Nights.” Us older girls got to stay up to 10 PM one weekend night every so often down at Driftwood, the library. We listened to scratchy albums on an old phonograph, read Nancy Drew mysteries to each other, served up some burnt popcorn and whacked each other with pillows during the obligatory pillow fight.

The saddest time?  The last day of camp when our parents came to pick up us. We’d surround the station wagon of the girl leaving and sing a lament while fighting back tears,

Here’s to our “Giulietta” to you we sing, whatever may happen what good times may bring, remember this camp, remember that we, your loyal friends will be …

I can honestly say I still feel loyal to those friends, wherever they may be.

“Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendour in the grass, of glory in the flower” on September 8th, there will be a one-day Camp Marlyn reunion at the camp, which remains much the same. If you attended Camp Marlyn before it closed in the 1990’s, please visit http://www.campmarlyn.com.

Muse thx

Giulietta

p.s. Quoted material from ~ Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood,  William Wordsworth.