Summer Sleep Away Camp in Maine
I had to get past my separation anxiety to give my daughter the gift of discovering herself.
Why Sleep Away Camp?
When we first moved to south Florida three years ago, we noticed that a lot of people chose not to spend their summers here. It makes sense, the summer in south Florida coincides with hurricane season, so it’s hot, muggy, and wet. While we can escape to the beaches, many people decide to escape entirely from the state, heading to Europe, South America, or up to the northeastern United States for an extended vacation.
Some people told me they chose to send their kids away to sleep away camp for the summer. My only real understanding of sleepaway camp was the image of uniformed girls marching down a forested path to the tune of the Colonel Bogey March as they head off to their cabins with no air conditioning and flimsy window coverings as shown in the 1961 movie The Parent Trap. As a child of Indian immigrants growing up in the San Francisco Bay Area, this was far from the way my summers were, mostly spent at local day camps and at home practicing musical instruments or babysitting my siblings. Given that we had settled into a south Florida…
