Total Recall
The world of our grandmother has been subsumed
by modern conventions but is exhumed
when remembering the cabin where all our relations
joined us each year for summer vacations.
Ping-pong and campfires and dunks in the lake.
Muddy dirt beaches on which we would bake
and turn brown in the sun, turning over in turns
to inspect our tan lines and moderate burns.
S’mores over campfires and mulligan stew
cooked on the coals and trips to the loo
making our way in the moonlight at night,
battling mosquitos and all things that bite.
Slapping our necks and our arms and our knees
at chiggers and ticks and horseflies and fleas.
Such glorious penance to pay for the fun
of cousins and swimming holes, horses and sun.
Vacations contemporary just don’t equal
those trips of our youth that have no modern sequel.
They live in our memories where we remember
Pleasures of July we recall in December.
Prompt words today are ping-pong, contemporary, cabin, subsume and grandmother.
Again, this is fiction. The camping memories were actually from church camp in the Black Hills
where I went every year. Loved it.
lifelessons - a blog by Judy Dykstra-Brown 
good poem of good memories~!
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We are lucky to have so many of those.
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You’ve captured a memorable time: priceless & precious. Yes, I too, given a comparable vintage, recall many a weekend at my parent’s friend’s camp in VT. Endless delight, even slapping the ‘all things that bite.’
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The granddaughter of M.E. Sanderson, who had the cabin in the Black Hills that I envied now has a blog entitled “Murdo Girl” and she has written about and published photos of that cabin. Waiting to hear from her if my sister is right and if that is the cabin we stayed in that time. If so one of my dreams was met that I didn’t even know about at the time.
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This is actually the cabin we stayed in in Yellowstone when we went to Idaho when you were 3, not the Sanderson cabin in the Black Hi!!s.
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The childhood camping experience is universal. Or at least it was.
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This is a fun bit of nostalgia. We have sed to camp with another family for several years and many times just us. Such a great way to spend a childhood summer!
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We’d throw bedspreads or blankets over the clothesline and make tents in our backyard, but I don’t think we ever spent the night in them. We would have slumber parties in the back yard and sleep out in sleeping bags, and at summer camp we slept in tents with beds in them we could put our sleeping bags on. My last year in camp they built cabins but I always preferred the tents.
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We usually camped in a large canvas tent, but once we rented a cabin on an island in a lake in Maine. Once we camped on the beach of an uninhabited island off the coast of Belize. That was quite the experience! Worst sunburn of my life, too.
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Wonderful memories.
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