Summer Camp - What We Carry Home
| Category: | Summer Camp |
|---|---|
| Notes: | For the last morning of summer camp, while the troop is packing up or at the final flag ceremony before departure. Part of a series - see also summer-camp-before-we-go, summer-camp-the-last-campfire, and summer-camp-the-drive-back. |
Your pack should be lighter going home than it was coming in. The snacks are gone. The bug spray is half used. Your clean socks ran out sometime around Wednesday.
But you're carrying more home than you brought. You just can't fit it in the pack.
You're carrying a skill you didn't have a week ago. Maybe it's a merit badge, or a knot, or the fact that you can now cook breakfast for eight people without burning more than half of it. You're carrying friendships with Scouts from your patrol, and probably a few from other troops whose names you'll forget but whose faces you won't.
And some of you are carrying something harder. Maybe you were homesick on Monday night. Maybe the swim test didn't go the way you wanted, or a merit badge didn't get finished. That comes home with you too, and it's not nothing. It's proof that you can have a hard week and still be standing here at the end of it, packed and ready to go. That's worth more than any patch.
So before you zip that pack, take a second and think about what's really going home with you. Then let's leave this campsite better than we found it, and go.