First Published in News – Tri-Town Transcript – Boxford, MA 8/10/18
By Esther Baird
Here it is mid-summer and I am very much ignoring the back to school nonsense that is starting to percolate into the ads. Mostly it’s easy to dismiss them because we’ve spent our summer at our family’s camp on northern Lake George where life is mostly off the grid.
But there have been enough doctors appointments and kids who need to go on missions trips or to camps that I’ve been back and forth frequently enough to know that the construction on Middleton Road in Boxford will never end and to lose track of where I am, let alone our two girls.
Our eldest spent a week volunteering at a shelter in Rhode Island over her birthday which was super cool, but also weird. And now our youngest is currently at camp and can only communicate by old-fashioned snail mail. But because of all my New England commuting, I am never where the mail gets delivered.
Obviously cyberstalking is my only option. Regular Readers will recall that I’ve written about this before when our older daughter went away, and I realized the wonderful and dangerous world of the camp webcam.
So this past Friday, after driving back home, I turned on the webcam and voila!! I saw her pink flip- flops and towel on the beach-side bench. I hadn’t heard from her in over a week so the sight gave me that sweet proof of life. She had to be one of the many teeny heads bobbing in the water off in the distance.
However, later that afternoon, near dinner time, the kids had cleared out… but her towel and shoes remained.
“Who does that??” I demanded to my older daughter. “Who runs off the beach in their bare-feet, dripping wet, and NEVER comes back? You’d be wet, you’d be sandy…” I trailed off.My daughter put forward some theories: maybe her friends were playing a game, maybe she was eating outside that night, maybe there was a surprise activity.
“Or,” I interrupted, “maybe she jumped on the blob and snapped her neck and is in traction at the nurse’s station and they haven’t called me yet because she’s about to be airlifted to a local hospital!”
I picked up the phone.
“Are you calling them!?” she asked, horrified.
What mother called the camp!? It was the forbidden step into crazy-pants land. But, please. I’ve lived in that land so long they’ve named streets and parks after me.
The phone rang and a chipper person answered. I tried to sound casual. “Hi there, I’m a camper mom, actually this is my camper’s fifth year! And, if you can believe it, this is the FIRST time I’ve ever called the camp.”
I let that gem sink in. I was not “that” mom.
“I’m just calling because, I happened to catch this on the webcam, so random that I even noticed, but I see that my daughter left her shoes and towel on the beach, and it’s dinner time now, isn’t it? So I just wanted to rule out any major injury, like, you know, maybe she fell off the blob and broke her neck and now can’t move, so clearly she couldn’t get her towel??”
Ok I was “that” mom. Name another landmark after me and let’s move on.
I summed things up. “If you could tell me if she’s on the nurses list that’d be great.”
The camp employee was super polite and didn’t sound like she was rolling an eye or making cuckoo gestures to anyone standing nearby.
She checked, “Nope, she’s not been at the nurse at all today!”
Tra la la.
“Thank goodness. I guess she just forgot her towel. I can’t imagine why, but, never-mind. Thank you.”But, meanwhile the towel was still on the beach cam.
My husband walked in and said, “That’s not her towel.”
I spluttered. “Yes it is!! It’s the orange one with the brown stripes, and those are her pink flip flops.”
“Flip flops all look the same to me, but that’s a shadow, not a brown stripe. It’s not hers.”
Our eldest, holding down the rational thought department, ran to our linen closet and checked. Seconds later she yelled “I found the towel!! It’s here! That’s not her towel!”
Fine. I was a little overwrought. A little over-traveled. I hadn’t had any mail from my baby child.
My husband suggested we step away from the computer and go get dinner and a drink. And no matter where I am this summer, that is a suggestion that always makes sense!