Life & Place · A Decembers list

The summers you spent away from home

The screen door on the cabin banged shut a hundred times a day. There was a smell of pine and wet towels, a bunk with your name taped to it, and a swim test on the first morning you weren't sure you'd pass.

This is the list for those weeks away. One camp at a time, one summer at a time — as much or as little as comes back.

Add your first camp

Free to start. Private from the first word.

Where this list lives

This is a list in Decembers — the place a life gets written down one question at a time.

Decembers asks the questions no one thought to ask, keeps the answers in one permanent Chronicle, and holds them on one Timeline that reads in order. You answer. Decembers does the writing.

Lists
A list for every kind of life, and every turn one takes. Pick one and start answering.
Timeline
Your answers arrange themselves in order. Seeing a whole life laid out this way is something else.
Inner Circle
Not social media. The few people you name are the only ones it is ever shared with.
See a sample Timeline

Begin with one list. The rest follows.

One line is enough

Write down the name of one counselor and the whole cabin comes back — the top bunk, the flashlight under the blanket, the kid who snored, the color of the lake at six in the morning.

Nobody kept a record of these weeks. There might be a form your parents filled out, a packing list, maybe a group photo where you can barely find your own face. But the important things left no paper: the homesickness of the first night, the inside joke that ran all session, the moment you swam out to the raft on your own for the first time. Those live only in you, and only until you set them down.

A whole book about summer camp would feel like too much — who has that in them. But a single line is easy. The name of the lake. The song you still half-know. The friend from three states over you wrote letters to all winter. Put down one, and the next one surfaces on its own. That is how this list gets written: not in one sitting, but a camp at a time, a summer at a time, whenever one comes back to you.

How it works

  1. 01

    Pick this list

    It’s waiting, already written. There is no blank page to face.

  2. 02

    Fill in what comes

    A year, a line, a photograph. Five minutes or an hour.

  3. 03

    Invite who was there

    They add what you forgot. You decide what stays.

  4. 04

    Share it, or don’t

    One quiet page for your Inner Circle. No link, no feed.

What comes back when you start

The place itself

The cabin with the crooked screen door and the bunks that squeaked. The lake and how cold it was at the first swim. The dining hall with its long tables and the bell that called you to meals. Draw it as you remember it, not as it probably was.

The people you were stuck with

Seven or eight kids to a cabin, chosen by nobody, and by the end of the week they were yours. The counselor barely out of high school who seemed impossibly grown. The kid you couldn't stand who became your best friend by Thursday.

What stuck with you

A song sung around the fire that you can still start humming. A knot you can still tie, a stroke you can still swim. The first time you were away from your mother's cooking and your father's rules, and found out you were fine.

Summer by summer

First summer
The year you went not knowing a soul, cried the first night, and swore you'd never go back — then counted the days until you could.
The middle years
When you knew the routine cold, had your spot in the cabin, and camp felt more like home than home did for those weeks.
Last as a camper
The summer you were the oldest, ran the traditions you'd once been taught, and knew without saying so that it wouldn't come again.
Counselor years
When you went back on the other side of it, slept in the same cabins, and watched a new batch of homesick kids you'd once been.
Day camp
The summers close to home — the bus each morning, the same lake or field, back in your own bed by supper.
Specialty camps
Music, sports, Scouts, church camp, band camp — the weeks built around one thing you loved or your parents hoped you would.

Other lists you may like

Start with any one of them. Every answer lands on the same Timeline.

Begin

A record of the summers that made you into who you came home as

Start with one camp — the lake, the cabin, the counselor's name. The rest of that summer will come back on its own once the first line is down.

Add your first camp