INTERVIEW LEAH
Leah is by far one of my closest if not closest camp friends and we weren’t even close to our final summer as campers. Leah and I both started going to camp in 2006, but until 2010 she would only stay for the first session. If you could go back and talk to 11 year old Leah you would bet anything in the world she wouldn’t make it to Teens summer.
Leah knows she wasn’t a camp person. She hates playing sports, she gets uncomfortably hot and doesn’t love being away from home. So much has changed since 2006. Leah and I weren’t in the same bunk until teen’s summer. She was always placed in the bunk with other girls who were only staying for the first session, and I never really got close to them. Leah and I decided to have an interview over video chat. She is now a freshman at Colgate University. We always joke about our friendship because we don’t really know how it started. We say that we both had ‘friend crushes’ on each other. She was in my bunk for our final summer and originally only registered to stay for the first half. She was friendly with many of the other girls in my bunk but I genuinely didn’t know much about her. We believe our friendship started one night when everyone went to sleep and we were the only two awake. We stayed up for hours talking and instantly became best friends. It’s so weird to think about how I didn’t know her for my first 5 summers at camp. Leah had never stayed for the second session and was pretty set on leaving. We aren’t sure exactly how we managed to convince her to stay, but she said that it was the best decision she ever made. The first week of second session is caravan, or when every age group has a trip away from camp. For the 15s you have your most anticipated caravan, a week in California. We flew to San Francisco and stayed there for 4 nights, Leah being one of my 3 roommates. Then we drove to LA and stayed in the UCLA dorms, where Leah and I were roommates again. We even moved the nightstand away and pushed the two beds together. |
By the end of the summer Leah was crying and maybe one of the more upset campers to leave. We all returned for the second session of LIT summer the following year. Leah and I are both from Westchester, NY so it really isn’t hard for us to visit each (even though we always manage to make it complicated.)
Camp is the only place in the world that you can make a best friend in just 3 weeks. I don’t know what I would do without Leah today. Although now that were both so caught up in our college lives, I know that she’s always there for me. She is the kind of friend I can go a month without talking to and still manage to pick up where we left off. She always can make me laugh or give the advice I need to hear. I’m sad to say it but Leah is actually going back to camp this summer as a counselor, while I am not. It’s definitely going to be weird knowing that she is there but I am excited to visit. When I asked Leah how she felt about being a counselor she said, “I am SO excited to be back at camp after spending two summers home. I think its definitely going to be weird at first but im sure im going to learn to love it. I know that Lyssie and Ricki liked being counselors so I think it’ll be a great experience.” We spent two hours video chatting just reminiscing on all the crazy, weird stuff we did together during our Teens and LIT summers. Leah gets me in a way that my other friends don’t. I guarantee we will stay close forever. |