By Sam Blum and Hannah Lafargue
I’ve been thinking a lot about corn. Not the dining hall corn or popcorn, but the cornfields right across from the office.
When we arrived at camp about a month and a half ago, there wasn’t much of anything in that field. But if you look now, there is a strong and beautiful crop. This seems somewhat unremarkable, but to watch something so green and imposing spring up from nothing is really quite striking.
On the Leadership Team, we spend a lot of time in and around the office. We look at that field quite a bit. We never see anybody tending to that field, watering the corn, whispering words of affirmation into the corn’s ears. Corn has ears, you know!
The corn just grows. Rain or shine, hot or breezy, it sprouts up. Like so much of camp, we notice it only in hindsight. It’s hard to feel yourself growing; it’s much easier to look back and see that you’ve grown.
Corn is cool, but humans have also kind of ruined it. There’s only a few varieties we see on our plates, very few kinds we allow to grow out of the thousands of varieties that exist in nature. We implore you to not feel like you are stuck in a similar rut. In this way, you are not like corn. There are so many ways you can grow, so many tasty varieties of human you could turn out to be.
You know what else sets us apart from corn? We are not in a rush, hurtling towards a harvest, pushing for efficiency. Not that long after we leave camp, the corn across the street will be cut down, its journey taken to its delicious and nutritious conclusion. But our growth will continue on, as we take what camp has given us home and share it with the people around us.
Next summer, there will be new corn in the field. But our Harlam community will have returned, wiser and stranger and stronger than we were before, ready to grow and grow and keep growing. To boldly grow where no person has grown before.
In our time at this beautiful institution we have been lucky enough to observe so many of you grow in a multitude of ways. We’ve seen you make new friends and embrace new challenges. We’ve watched you figure out who you are, bit by bit, summer by summer.
We’ve watched you turn from sweet little Sharonians enjoying the earliest stages of your camper journey into Chavurah campers – Harlam experts – tackling the stream hike this morning with ease and beginning to write this final chapter of your camper stories.
We’ve watched you go from crazy Galil campers feeling nervous about the Galil hike or who to ask to the dance to amazing staff members and role models helping your own campers navigate those same challenges.
It might be a little corny to say, but we are so grateful to watch you grow each and every day.
We hope that your summer is truly a-maize-ing.
As we move into our silent prayer, perhaps you’ll think about the growing you’ll do this summer, or the growing you’ve done in summers past.
If you’re silent enough, perhaps you can make out the corn rustling in the wind on the other side of Smith Road, slowly, imperceptibly, growing!
Sam Blum is the Junior Camp Supervisor this summer. Sam is from South Salem, NY. This will be his 7th summer on staff and his 13th summer at Camp Harlam. Fun fact his favorite camp meal is pierogies!
Hannah Lafargue is thrilled to be the Senior Camp Supervisor! It is her 12th summer at Camp Harlam. She recently graduated from the University of Delaware with degrees in Political Science and Psychology. In the fall she will start law school at the University of Maryland.