Thunder rumbled in the distance.  I lay awake in my bunk, listening to the first drops of rain fall onto the tin roof of the cabin...
                                Opening statement from a speech I gave in 1988 describing my first experience at camp.

There is some magic in the music of rain against tin - this lulling draw that tugs you to sleep and rocks you gently like a wagon wheel.  It was as we finished our dinner, rain drops splattering our plastic plates, soggy supper scarfed down and dishes washed quickly while drops drew rings in soapy water.

And then to sleep, perchance to dream, beneath this tin singing with rain song and I can't help but remember that speech I wrote when I was eight years old and how it's as real in this moment as it was back then and how my children rest their own ages around the border of my earliest camp memories and I'm giving them exactly what meant so much to me so long ago.

Hours of this pounding rhythm.  Hours of water that would wash us away were it not for this thin, loud tin above us.

"Mommy?" She's standing by my bunk and I can just see the pink of her flannel pajamas in the brief flash of lightning.  "Mommy, I had a bad dream."

And I pull her in beside me, her warm little body welcome in the chill of the storm, and she curls up against me and I kiss her hair.

"Mommy," she whispers.  "I dream-ded that Zander was a moose and he couldn't get through the door 'cause his horns were real big and he wanted to eat us!"

"Oh my," I say.  "It was just a dream though.  Go back to sleep.  Blueberry pancakes in the morning."

"Okay," and she's already falling.

"I love you."

"Love you too."

And we both drift off again to the same sounds I wrote of twenty-five years ago.

A trailer ride through the puddles on the next day...