grace duVal

I know I haven’t written in a while, but there’s honestly not much to talk about. Every day feels like a strangely similar carbon copy of another. Anyone who’s been to camp understands that the days melt into each other, and very soon you have no concept of time, days of the week, or hours in the day. For example, in all honesty I have no idea what day it is. We do the same thing every day here at camp on the same schedule at the same time. The only thing to shake up that routine is the occasional and entirely torrential rainstorm, which happens rather frequently up here.

Mainly we’ve been working on camp projects like getting the bunks ready or cleaning the FAB, but for some reason we’ve had lots of downtime this year so I’ve been in my shack fixing it all up. It’s a strange layout and over the non-camp season I decided that I was going to completely renovate it with a built in desk and lots of shelves, seeing as there’s zero storage space. All of this week I’ve been making that come to life, talking with the lovely maintenance crew and getting them to let me take spare plywood and two-by-fours. The theater has also been kind enough to let me use their saws for cutting the wood to size and sanding it down; it’s handy to know people all over camp! Needless to say there have been incessantly loud noises coming from my shack.

At this point I’m pretty much done with that project and I have to say it looks great. There’s tons more room and all of the space I have is more usable. I’ve also hung fairy (christmas) lights around the shack which seems to immediately draw people in (it also helps that my shack is directly on the way to laundry). Everyone keeps coming in and saying “well, you might as well live here!” I have to say, I did it in part because I’m rather picky about my living and working conditions—I can’t stand white walls or plain surfaces, I need lots of visual stimulation. But I also think of this as a gift to the camp. I know that the next photo teacher will probably be very pleased to have everything that I’ve spiffed up, though they’ll never really know what it was like before I got my hands on it…

So other than my constant playing with tools it’s been a very standard camp week. I’ve gotten to know lots of new people as well as returning staff. It’s fascinating because most of the returners this year weren’t people I was especially close with last year, so in a way it’s like I’m getting to know a whole other set of people with whom I’m already acquainted. I really love getting to know the new people; in fact, Jim has made fun of me and told me that I officially need to declare myself an extrovert. Perhaps he’s right… I think camp just lets me be a bit more exuberant than I am in real life (if you can imagine that).

So yes, camp is everything it’s always been, lots of new faces, lots of meeting and greeting, many many different accents and an endless supply of rain. It’s great to be back and it’s good to be settled. I really love both of my co-counselors so far, and I think we’re going to make a terrific team. Tomorrow the kids arrive and we start the crazy thing that is camp. I love it, and at the same time I want to sleep forever. I think I’ll at least go to sleep for tonight and see what tomorrow brings…

I’ve always known that time passes strangely at camp. It can seem like a week has passed when it’s only been two days, or it can feel like you’ve been sat still for ten minutes when it’s actually hours. Time moves in strangely bizarre patterns, but I never realized that it stops all together. When we arrived back at camp yesterday evening I went to my shack, then down to Sunrise 1, the bunk I was in last year, only to find that nothing had changed. Not a single thing had moved or been relocated—it was all precisely as I had left it. It was as if I had simply stepped away for a very long day off and came back to find everyone missing. In fact it doesn’t feel like I ever left at all. I suddenly can’t remember anything about what I did in the intermediate time between leaving camp and coming back. It’s like some strange never-ending time circle of familiarity and timelessness.

Camp has experienced a phenomenon that rarely happens: a very large number of returning staff members. In fact, over half of the staff this year are returners, so I already feel at home among the people that I know. I spent so much of yesterday running around excitedly hugging people that I haven’t seen in a year. It’s so easy to meet people here, and the people you already know are practically family. It’s impossible to come here and love this place without forming incredibly close relationships with the amazing people around you.

So we’ve started to settle into routine, taking the new maintenance crew around the grounds and showing them where they live, helping everyone integrate into the new life. Last night Jim, Carrie and I all hung out in my shack while I started to decorate it with fairy lights, just talking and hanging out. Today the three of us have spent the entire time in the upper Sunrise bunks polyurethaneing the wood in the new bathrooms, taking a break to go into town to get some ice cream from Hoss’s. Now I’m on the FAB couch, half asleep, waiting for the dinner bell. Then perhaps tonight I’ll start to fix up my shack. We shall see. The counselors arrive tomorrow, steadily trickling in over the course of the day in their cars, and then a giant load of staff arrives on a tour bus around four. While it’s nice to be on a quiet camp, I’m a firm believer that the more people around, the better. It’ll be nice to see the place brimming with people again.

It’s so familiar here, so like home, it feels good to be back. 

well, Jim and I have just left the Biddle’s house and are now currently sitting in the Wal-Mart parking lot while Jim fills the General up with oil. Turns out he likes to burn oil and when Jim checked this morning we were nearly out! Luckily he’s my handy dandy mechanic and is managing to get it all straightened out without too much hassle.

It’s been really relaxed around the beach house for the last few days. I haven’t written because the internet went down and the beach house, which meant that instead of sitting in front of the computer I actually had to interact with people! oh the horror! So that’s what I’ve been doing. There have been many games of croquet in the front yard and lots of relaxing on the beach while Jim teaches David and Jimmy how to fly his giant kite. On Friday night we had Amy’s graduation party, which consisted of a giant cookout in the front yard with her MMA friends, followed by a fire poi show by Jim down on the beach.

Yesterday was Amy’s actual graduation, so we all got up extra early, spiffed ourselves up and drove over to the MMA campus for the ceremony. It was a pretty standard service, lots of speeches, lots of encouragement, lots of names called. It was beautiful to see the sea of white dress uniforms sitting in front of us, though I’m sad that they didn’t march in military formation as that’s always a fantastic display! After graduation we all went back to the house where we ate the billions of leftovers we had from the cookout, then spent the rest of the day on the beach. I needed a few seconds to myself because (believe it or not) I am an introvert, and every so often I just need a second alone to breathe and recuperate. I took a few hours and drove to the local thrift shop and then over to the coffee shop before I re-joined the whole clan down on the beach.

After another intensive kite flying lesson with Jim, David and Jimmy we ate more and then spent the evening milling around, chatting and looking at pictures that I’d taken over the course of the week. Later in the evening, after half of the house had retired, Jim and I went down to the beach to do another round of fire poi so I could get better pictures. My dad gave me the most spectacular point-and-shoot Canon camera as a graduation present and so I’ve only been using that camera since May (meaning every picture I’ve posted recently has been taken with that camera). It takes incredible photos, but I still don’t know how to use all of the controls as thoroughly as I understand my SLR.

So down to the beach we trekked, giant camera, tripod and poi in hand, accompanied by Sally, Dave, Dwight and Jimmy. Once again Jim pulled out and amazing show, but this time I got to be front and center and start to direct him for some of the photos. It’s amazing how many more pictures I was able to get just because there’s no delay on my SLR where, no matter what, there will always be a processing delay on my point and shoot. We got some really wonderful shots and, as usual, Jim’s audience was entranced.

After we came back to the house and had a look through my pictures everyone went to bed and Jim, Dwight and I stayed up and talked in the kitchen for a while. Eventually though, even we sprightly young things got tired and decided to call it a night.

This morning has been full of packing and moving out of the house. It’s amazing how much stuff you accumulate in one week! By ten Jim and I were packed and hit the road! Now we’re off to our next great adventure, up to the Adirondack Mountains of Long Lake New York where we spend the next ten weeks teaching and loving life. It seems like only yesterday day we left, I can’t believe it’s already time to go back. I’m so excited to settle back in and get to see all of my friends. Long Lake, here we come!

well, nothing much of interest happened yesterday! I sat around the house with Dave and his mom for most of the day, taking some time to walk down along the beach and into the town, but spending most of the afternoon doing nothing of importance. Jim and Amy were off shoveling multiple tons of sand, while Sally, Jimmy and Robin went towards Boston to pick up a friend and get Amy’s brother Dwight. So the house was quiet, and it was a silently overcast day that you could see through the living room.

People slowly filtered back into the house around five, with Amy, Jim and I taking an excursion to the beach for Jim to fly his giant kite. Then the Hutch clan showed up with Dwight in tow and we all sat down for a dinner of fresh lobster and swordfish. I tried so hard to like it, but my mine thinks too much and realizes that the animal we’re currently consuming was alive and flopping around in the fridge for the entire afternoon. I am a hypocritical carnivore, I know.

After dinner Amy and I peeled back the carpet in the living room and set up our own salon to cut each other’s hair. We’ve been doing that for years so it was only appropriate that we take the time to get a trim from each other. Jim joined in the fray and got his hair trimmed by Amy, who used to work as a dog groomer, so she’s as good as a professional!

Other than the hair-cutting, the kites and the lobster it was a quiet, uneventful day. Again this morning people have scattered in different directions to do things. We’ll see what the afternoon brings!

I bought this book in Provincetown. Each page is a different day of the year with five slots to write in, so every day for five years you’re supposed to write a sentence about what you did that day. Then at the end of five years you can see what you did on a particular day for the past five years. Brilliant!!

Yesterday was a late start around the house, as Amy, Jim and I are a bunch of lazy teenagers who have nothing better to do than sleep in and not leave the house till three in the afternoon. None of which is true because we are 1. no long teenagers 2. definitely not lazy (the majority of the time) and 3….. ok, yeah, we did leave the house at three in the afternoon. But no matter! We needed to take the morning to just chill out.

Eventually we got bored of sitting around so the three of us piled into Amy’s car and headed out the arm of Cape Cod, around the curve and all the way to the very, very tip to the village of Provincetown. I’d been there years ago with my parents and loved the quirky little streets, the Cape Cod style houses and the general quaint-yet-quirky atmosphere of the place. We spent a few lazy hours wandering down the streets, stopping in various fun and colorful shops, forcing Jim to stand around while Amy and I tried on clothing and jewelry. We found one phenomenal shop that was full to the rafters with crazy objects, random sailing buoys and old military paraphernalia. It literally held everything, and we found ourselves trying on old uniforms and digging though barrels of patches while we marveled at the vast array of things that hung from the ceiling. 

Overall it was a quiet, cloudy, slightly rainy day on the coast. We enjoyed the shops till around seven, then piled back in the car and went back to the beach house for dinner. Afterwards the whole crew, including Amy’s parents, uncle, and grandmas, joined in a lively game of Dictionary. The rules are simple: one person, the referee of the round, finds an obscure word in the Dictionary that nobody knows. The other players each get a piece of paper and write down a fake yet convincing definition to go with the word. The referee then reads all of the definitions and everyone votes on which one they believe to be the real definition. Whoever gets the most votes for having the most convincing definition wins the round!

It might sound like a very nerdy game, but in reality it’s incredibly amusing and as we all sat around the kitchen table we found ourselves falling to pieces in hysterical laughter at the ridiculous words and definitions that everyone came up with. The most ridiculous part was that we didn’t actually have a Dictionary in the house, so we resorted to using the computer where Jimmy, Amy’s uncle, found a website of obscure words. It was a magnificent idea, and we found some of the most random words ever. A few of the words used in our game were:

galactophagist: a milk drinker
nelipot: a person who walks barefoot
tattogey: someone who cheats by using loaded dice
thelimachy: a war between women
labidophorous: to have a pair of pincer-like organs

I ended up being the winner of the game, so I was told that as a reward I have to make one complete sentence using all of the words from the game… I still haven’t gotten around to it, but it sounds like a fair challenge!

Now it’s early in the afternoon and I’m about to go out for a wander around the town of Onset, where we’re staying. Amy somehow drafted Jim into shoveling a lot of sand for money so they’re off for the afternoon. Meanwhile the Hutcheson contingent has gone to visit an old family friend while David and Grandma Botzel are sleeping/reading in the living room.

It’s a calm, quiet afternoon on the cape!

I am currently sitting on the couch in the Biddle/Hutch beach house on Cape Cod. Jim and I arrived late at night, where my best friend Amy promptly showed us her new netbook. “How long have you had it?” Jim asked. “Oh, a month or two,” Amy replied, which ilicited some confusion from Jim and myself. See, Amy met Jim three weeks ago, saw his netbook and decided to purchase her own. “Uh, Amy, by ‘a few months’ do you mean two weeks?” Giggling in response she said “yeah, ok, you’re right… but it’s been a LONG few weeks around here.”

That is precisely how I feel right now. I must have updated my blog a maximum of two weeks ago, but it honestly feels like it could have been a few months. Life is moving in this extremely bizzare hyper-drive/turtle speed time mix that makes me never quite sure what time or day it is, let alone where I’m supposed to be or where I’m going. It’s been confusing, that’s for sure.

The past two weeks have been mainly spent in Richmond where I’ve been finishing up my final sculpture studio class, which I need to graduate. During the days I was down at the studios working away while Jim futzed about at the house. I dreaded this class because I assumed it would be another annoying sculpture class where I wouldn’t fit in or make any art that was agreeable with the department aesthetic. So I was really surprised when it turns out that I loved the class. There were only three students, including myself, so it was incredibly intimate and amazing. I could work in the studios without feeling like I was being judged, and our teacher, Tim, was so relaxed that I never felt like I was being pressured into making a specific type of art.

The other great thing about the class was that every week Tim took us all on a field trip somewhere different. The final week we went to Washington DC, which was perfect because Jim had never been. We went on a whirlwind four-hour excursion around the city, taking Jim to all of the giant monuments, then over to the White House and then wandering back up the mall, stopping at a few museums along the way. Even though it was short, it was a great intro to our nation’s capitol.

I finished up class last Friday, which was an entirely surreal experience. Even though I’ve already “graduated” it wasn’t real that I was actually leaving Richmond… it was just a strange ceremony that I went through before I went back to school. But during my last crit it suddenly occurred to me that I was actually finished with four years of school. It was a surreal moment, to say goodbye in my final crit, to leave the FAB that I’d been in for two years. I never though I’d be sad to leave the Sculpture department, but this final, intimate class with Tim taught me more than any other Sculpture class I’d taken and made me appreciate the Sculpture department in a way that I never had before. Thanks to this one class I found myself heartsick as I left for the final time.

Of course, immediately following my final class of my undergraduate career I had to go back to my apartment and pack up my entire life so that I could move everything to a storage unit before Jim and I disappeared off to camp. Luckily my parents came into town to help and we spent all of Saturday and Sunday renting a U-Haul, packing everything into boxes and relocating it all to a storage unit back home. It was an insanely complicated and grueling job, as I have ridiculous amounts of stuff and the temperature was up into the nineties with very, very high humidity. The entire time we were moving we were dripping sweat from the intense weather.

Moving out of my apartment was, by far, the hardest part of leaving Richmond. I’ve come to love the city that I’ve spent the past four years in, but what has made it so enjoyable is the apartment I’ve been in for the past two years. It’s lovely and huge, with my own back porch where I do all of my sewing. Even though it’s on a major street it’s nearly silent in my apartment, as I’m in the back side of a house completely surrounded by trees. That apartment was my haven and safe space no matter what was going on in my life, and I always loved coming back in the evening and being in my own private place.

When we finally got the entire van loaded and said goodbye to the apartment I was completely gutted. It’s such a surreal experience to think that four years have gone by and that I’ve just left a place that had come to mean so much to me. As we pulled away from my apartment for the last time I couldn’t stop myself from crying. It’s been a good four years, and it’s hard to say goodbye to them.

We drove late into the night and unpacked the moving van around midnight before we all went back to the house in Natural Bridge and crashed out after two exhausting, continuous days of moving. Then on Monday morning Jim and I packed up the car and hit the road north towards Cape Cod. We spent the night in some random part of Pennsylvania and then yesterday we continued onwards in our journey north.

A few years ago my family drove through that exact same part of the state and discovered this completely random, obscure, and completely spectacular amusement park complete with two old school wooden roller coasters. We had a blast at the park and I insisted that Jim and I make a point to stop there on our way through PA. We took an hour detour into the mountains of Pennsylvania and landed at the amusement park, Knoebels, where we spent the entire afternoon riding everything we could possibly ride, including multiple turns on the wooden roller coasters. It was so much fun to be in this park messing about, as it’s the first real vacation I’ve had in months. We had a blast there and spent at least four hours riding all of the rides before we hopped back in the car and continued north.

The rest of yesterday was spent in the car driving upwards and eastwards towards the coast. Eventually around midnight we pulled into the beach house where Amy’s family is staying for the week before her graduation. We caught up with Amy briefly before we all went to bed and crashed. This morning has been spent around the kitchen table, hanging out with the family and talking. As I walked downstairs this morning I looked out the window and saw that we are literally sat on the beach, with the water and sand jutting right up next to our front yard. It can’t get much more idyllic than that! Today we are without plans, though we want to explore the Cape in some capacity. I’m impartial, and I’m just glad to have a moment to breathe.

My mom once told me a story of a group of American explorers who went on an climb that was lead by natives of the country they were in. After a few days the natives sat down and refused to move onwards, telling the Americans that they needed to rest so that their spirits could catch up with their bodies. That is precisely how I feel. I’ve been moving too fast, doing too much, having so many changes happen in such a short period of time that my mind hasn’t had time to process any of it.

Here I am, sat on the front porch of a beautiful house looking out at the ocean and I feel upset inside. It’s not because of where I am, but of what has happened so quickly. I’ve had no time to process everything that’s happened in my life and now I need to take some time to mourn. I’ve just lost a home that I’ve had for the past two years, a city full of people that I’ve come to love in the past four years. I have a new chapter of my life that’s just opened, which is full of excitement, yes, but is also full of uncertainty. I don’t know how I’ll have a job, where I’ll live, what I’ll do or what I’ll become. Yes, it’s all very exciting, but it’s ok for me to be scared, and I am.

So right now I’m just letting myself catch up and come to grips with everything that’s happening. I couldn’t be in a better place to do that, with my second family, my best friend and a wonderful boy. It’s a wonderful life, and I’m having a marvelous time, but damn. sometimes it’s incredibly overwhelming.

our 1994 Toyota Camry just hit 400,000 miles! Right before it hit the 400,000 mile mark mom, dad, Jim and I piled in and drove it around the neighborhood until it rolled over, just so we could get good pictures.

It’s been a loyal car since we got it in ‘97 and it’s still going strong! Here’s to many more miles!

On the drive back to Richmond on Monday night Jim and I heard a rattle, a shake, a thump, and then the engine heat flicked all the way to super hot. Luckily Jim is a car genius so he immediately guessed (ever so correctly) that the fan belt had gone, which it had. Stranded on the side of Interstate 81 he proceeded to get out a flashlight and rebuild the other fan belt that had started to come off as a result. After the car cooled we’d drive it on the side for a little bit till it overheated again, slowly inching it towards the exit. Luckily my dad came shortly and they pushed it off the interstate while I steered.

We then spent the entirety of Tuesday afternoon at a conveniently located abandoned gas station, which we turned into our own personal garage. Thank god Jim know so much about cars, because he was able to fix everything that was wrong, even if it took all afternoon. It’s good to have a mechanic about, huh?

my car is kind of really broken right now-which is stressing me out, I have soooo much to do, I have so many ideas running through me head with no time to do them, I need to pack up my entire apartment and uproot my life, I’m going to the most amazing place in the world in two weeks, I have the greatest boy ever who’s willing to live in small quarters with me and put up with my quirks, I’m not outside in the sun enough, I’m not sewing enough, I don’t have enough money, I have no idea if I’ll be able to afford grad school or living in Chicago, I don’t even know if I want to go to Chicago, I’m homesick for England-which is ridiculous considering England is not home, I want to make some epic dresses, I need to apply for things, I want to photograph more, I wish it wasn’t so hot that everything sticks to me, I need less going on in my life so that I can do more things that I love, I need to go camping, I need to live outside, I need to leave the city,

I need to breathe.