The Return to Grier

When I got in the car after my high school graduation, rose bouquet and diploma in hand, I felt at my core that it was the end of an era. I was leaving Grier, the place that I’d called home for four years and while I knew I would inevitably visit from time to time, I never expected to have a significant role there again in the near future. Then this summer came, a summer full of change and personal transformation. I have just finished my sophomore year of college and somehow, I found myself back at the pineapple gates, this time with a name tag reading “Counselor Edie”. Grier summoned me back into its world and I heeded the call. 

It had always been on my bucket list to be a counselor for Grier’s summer camp at some point after graduation, especially if I could rope my best friend and fellow Grier grad Anna into the adventure. For a summer job, I make this all sound extremely romantic and serendipitous, but that’s how Grier is when you spent some of the most formative years of your life there. It’s a high school, yes, but it’s also a sisterhood that sticks with you forever if you let it. Grier has a way of reaching into your soul and holding on long past graduation. Maybe it’s the extensive school history that makes it feel like a Harry Potter story, maybe it's the secluded campus in the mountains, or maybe it's the international all girls environment. Maybe it’s just because it was the first place I that took my artistic dreams seriously. Some combination of these and other factors led me to always have a special place in my heart for Grier. 

I came into this camp somehow never having attended an overnight summer camp as a kid so the initial culture of chants, silly songs and games were new and wonderful to me. I felt myself learning alongside the girls under my watch. My memories became tied to poetic moments of girlhood at summer camp: 

Little girls in flower crowns galavanting around the garden. Hours of card games, which I usually lost. Marshmallows so burnt you can smell the smoke. Muffled late night laughter heard through the too-thin cabin walls. The occasional lost sock. The messiest but most special manicures of my life. One too many ice cream sandwiches taken out of the kitchen freezer. …North Cottage’s mystery spoon. 

A special highlight of camp was getting to help teach black and white film photography in the darkroom where my obsession with photography first began. In freshman year I took my first ever photography class, down in “Mr. Pingry’s Dungeon” and found that black and white film was both excruciatingly frustrating and fascinating. The quiet mystery of the darkroom and all of the calculated drama that came with it became a haven for me as I navigated starting as a student at Grier. This summer, during my first walk through of the school after moving in for camp, I immediately went to the photography classroom. I was greeted by the familiar vinegar-and-sepia toner smell. Getting to spin back through the creaky portal into that other world created a lump in my throat so large, I had to leave before I burst into tears. 

One of the biggest things that returning to Grier showed me was just how much being in an all-girls environment for four years shaped my world view. Attending co-ed art school for college after an all-girls high school didn’t feel like a huge transition socially, but being back in a space in which empowering young girls to learn about themselves and try new things was the priority showed me just how important that was to my teenage-hood. Anyone could try horseback riding, hip hop or quilting, despite never having touched a sewing machine before. That’s the joy of not just summer camp, but Grier. You can try anything.

Without really realizing it, that ability to try anything within the world of Grier set me up more for the spaces I currently find myself in than I acknowledge. The fields I’m studying, photography and graphic design, are all about taking the world around you and turning it into a piece of media that’s informative and intriguing to outside viewers. For me, that has taken me to photojournalism, in which I make my life into a sort of journalistic practice. I obsess over archiving my life’s experiences into everything from YouTube vlogs to haphazard sketchbooks. Though the instinct to document the world around me started at a much younger age, my years at Grier helped me to realize how important the connections that come out of documenting the world, are. Every year of high school I would meet a different set of peers from around the world and have often only a year or two to form a connection with them before they returned to their home country. Some of my earliest photoshoots were me simply trying to capture my beautiful friend in a photograph before she returned to her faraway home, as I feared I’d never see her in person again. I’m so thankful that these global connections have stayed with me and have often fueled my current travels. 

This revelation about the roots of my documentary art passion came to me in waves as we prepared to move all of our campers out at the end of the third week of camp. I realized that I’d formed connections with a set of girls whose lives and wellbeing I’d come to truly care about. I want to know how her horse was doing, how her transition to a new school went and how she liked the rest of that book I recommended. Of course, part of the beauty of summer camp is the brief intensity of it. For between one and three weeks, I’d laughed and cried alongside a few dozen of the coolest, goofiest and brightest young girls around, and now we all return to our different realities. 

The return to Grier brought so many more emotions than I expected and with that influx of nostalgia and bittersweet memories came a lot of self reflection. It’s only been two years since I passed my legacy via candlestick on the colonnade but so much has happened. I’ve started college in a new state and city, traveled to many new places, met some of the most interesting people in the world, ran a few thousand more miles, and maybe, kind of, perhaps got closer to figuring out how I want to make a difference in the world. The return was, like the school itself, intense and fulfilling. I was reminded of the importance of girlhood, from the messy tearful moments to the dance-like-nobody’s-watching joyful ones. 

So Grier, as always, thank you.