ABSTRACT
Summer, 1981. 1 am eighteen. I have just spent the best summer of my life as a counselor at Girl Scout camp. The camp is located in Defiance, Ohio, a town that must surely have been named for the camp counselors who have passed through there. All I can say about why the summer was so great is that I have finally met women who feel like real friends. They have moved into a space inside me, very near my soul, that has always felt terrifyingly empty. All my life I have said (to myself, that is—all this occupies a vast unspoken territory in my mind) that no one really knows me, that there is something about me that no one understands or has ever touched. At the beginning of the summer my friend Julie said that if my personality was a color, it would be black, I am that mysterious. Now everything has changed. These women, these uniformed camp counselors with their woodsy nicknames and leather monkey-fists hanging tough around their sunburned necks, their tousled short hair and big grins, these women knocked away that empty feeling with their first slap on my shoulder and first race back to the tent. They have smoothed over that gaping, tatter-edged hole in my heart with their appreciation for gritty courage, of which I discover I have plenty.
