When I was nearing the end of my freshman year in college, I started looking around for a summer job. By a sheer miracle, and some stretching of the truth about my prior experience, I parlayed my Ecole Champlain kitchen girl experience into a job as a cook at a summer camp of another ilk – where a bunch of well-to-do families preoccupied with other important matters (drinking gin and tonics, playing tennis) hired a cook for the summer and ate three meals a day, six days a week in a central dining hall. 
Camp Randolph (which I have just noticed has its own jokey Facebook page so I assume still exists) is a necklace of family-owned cottages on two levels overlooking Lake Champlain in Highgate Springs, Vermont. The lake widens here into a huge, beautiful bay bordering Canada.
As the first week of the camp cooking experience approached, I was totally terrified, though armed with recipes feeding a crowd, thanks to the kind cooks at my college dining room, who shared the secrets of Brownie Pudding for 50 and other delights. What were these people thinking, hiring an 19-year-old to cook for them all summer, were they crazy?
My only help was three high school aged “waitresses,” local girls who, like me in the past couple of summers, were reveling in living (just slightly) away from home, in the quarters above the dining room. But, after a few missteps in quantities and varieties of foods that this crowd – ranging from babies through senior citizens – would all eat, I settled into the job, made great friends with the waitresses, and even got invited to some of the cocktail parties thrown by the residents. We had private jokes about the various residents, including Mr. Dunham, who kept a garden and supplied us with way too many zucchinis, and one who always declared the food “Marvy!”
It was a great adventure the first summer, heartbreaking the second when I fell hard for the son of one of the camp families and got dumped, and definitely a drag the third year, when the “been there, done that” settled in. The consolation was, as usual, the Lake. In between meal preparations, grocery orders, and clean up, the waitresses and I spent as much time on or in the lake as possible, all three of those summers. Canoeing around Bandstand Island, swimming at the little public beach, getting a thrill ride on someone’s power boat, or just sitting on a dock watching its many moods, as I had so many years before much further south, the connection to the lake made it all worthwhile.
So there you have it, my formative summers on the lake, spanning the borders between being a kid and becoming a semi-grownup. Although I still try to get in or around water as often as possible, I have never been closer to a body of water, in proximity or spirit, since those summers. I probably swallowed enough of Lake Champlain for a lifetime in those years, though, so maybe that is why it still seems to run in my blood.
South Carolina. None of them were Southerners by birth, but no matter. There seem to be many more relocated Northerns (like our family) or Midwesterners than actual natives in HHI these days, since the original 
ora and fauna. Or go kayaking, parasailing, paddle boarding, etc. etc. We went on a very nice sunset/fireworks boat tour with my sister’s Rotary Club members. Dolphins obligingly made an appearance, as well as the full moon. It was a good respite from the Washington, DC area swelter – which comes for most of us without a beach and/or our own swimming pool – and work. From sunrise (which I always try to get up in time for, and usually don’t make it) to sunset (which is great from the water), HHI is a nice place to visit.
f so, it is all we will be eating for awhile I guess. Send me some squash recipes just in case!
First up, 
therwise totally bad for you just as authentic ethnic food usually is. First, they go grocery shopping. Then they start cooking. If the recipe calls for booze, Mr. Gale always needs to sample some of the rum or vodka liberally. Some singing and dancing usually occurs as well. The grandmas seem to love him, although I have to say I think he is slightly creepy. He does manage to sneak in a pretty good oral history interview during the cooking, though, which along with the recipes makes this a folklorist-approved show.
The tent might even be gone by now, and the only remains will soon be a very large circle of dead grass and a few crayon and colored paper bits ground into the hard-baked soil. But my 2016 summer interns and I will remember the moments of joy, frustration, laughter, disappointment, and exhaustion that made it an area where we hope kids had fun and learned something about cultural traditions.
One of these activities was Basque Number Bingo, which I generated from an online template that allows you to turn just about any string of related words or images into a bingo game for kids.
These wet and wild gardens are one of those hidden gems in Washington, DC that you can easily miss – in fact, we did the first time around because there is no sign (and apparently no exit off Kenilworth Avenue) if you are heading north, and we had to turn around at the 
Well, anyhow, in the afternoon my good friend and colleague Elaine Eff and a young and enthusiastic representative from the Highlandtown Business Association (Amanda, I never caught your last name, sorry) led a tour of the painted screens of the neighborhood. What, you never heard of a painted screen? Well, luckily, Elaine has written the
Jennifer, the intern from the Netherlands, wanted to do the iconic 
Despite the cattle-like treatment of the blue plastic line-up by the staff handlers (“Move up – move along!”) and the rush of teenagers to the better viewpoints, I have to say the experience was still awesome. Especially when you get to the base of Horseshoe Falls and the cold mists hit you full force. This makes you abandon your camera and just live in the moment (because you can’t see anything through the viewfinder except water, for one thing). I have to admit, I got a little choked up – the majesty of nature and all that.