Letters From Home

There is good heartbreak and there is bad heartbreak. Sending your child off to summer camp falls in the first category. It’s like having a window broken in your house because you have a home, and your happy, healthy kids are playing around with a ball outside, and your family is young and your children still live at home, and you are actively living and experiencing what will be THE BEST MEMORIES OF YOUR ENTIRE LIFE. So, a little perspective.

But it still hurts. For me, doing newsletters from home helps. I even look forward to my summer temp job roasting family members and reporting on mundane household happenings as Editor-in-Chief of The (Our Street Name) Gazette. Some articles that didn’t make it to press this past summer: Scott Mystified by Sunburn, Mom Eats Salad, Josh Posts Weird Video on Group Chat, Lucia Gets Joke. You get the idea. They’re inside jokes that are only funny and comforting to the kid and family separated by summer character-building rituals. Although I am told that these dispatches elicit chuckles from cabin-mates when shared (as I imagine it) like a kid reading their 17 All-Time Most Hilarious Mad Libs Ever to you.

I recently came across some Gazettes sent to the Adirondacks a decade ago to my now-20-year-old. How they made me smile. And how they broke my heart in a new way.