Target practice

Even though I visit Signing Woman’s camp in the mountains every fall, I still keep discovering new things. On one of my walks, I took a shortcut through a property owned by the YMCA and came across a row of targets. It’s good, I suppose, that I was headed in the right direction when I stumbled on the archery range: the disadvantage of trespassing is that you lose your right to be indignant when you get hit by an errant arrow.

A couple of kids had bows and arrows and were practicing. An old man stood nearby, keeping a watchful eye. I smiled at him and started asking questions.

He worked for the YMCA, it turned out. “I started coming here when I was a baby,” he said. His parents met at the camp back in the 1930s.

“My parents met in the mountains, too,” I told him. “At a resort in the late 1950s. My mother was a guest, and my father was a musician.”

We chatted and compared notes, and he told me more about the camp, whose grounds cover more than 600 acres. I’d seen some of the more public parts of the camp, actually. The labyrinth down by the lake is one of my favorite places: walking the labyrinth is a form of spirituality that suits me well. When the kids ran out of arrows, our conversation came to an end, and I kept on walking, taking photos as I wandered past cottages, tennis courts, and a lovely stone wall.