Monthly Archives: April 2014

Spring CamasCon

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Scruffy is hauling his 200+ board games back home today. The spring CamasCon is over and now they must all be placed back on the shelf in our dinning room. Scruff started this board game retreat seven years ago because of his personal passion for strategy board games and the people who play them.

Yep, Scruffy is a card-carrying geek. He even has a profile on www.boardgamegeek.com. Christian gamers from all over the state and even a few other places as well, congregate at Camas for a weekend clustered around the camp tables playing games. They nibble snacks that aren’t messy because that would mean food dust on the games. My brother brings up a 3-foot-long gummy worm for everyone to eat and wears his Yoshi sweats the whole time. And pretty much everyone doesn’t sleep.

Jeffery, the youth pastor from Little Stone Church, was the speaker this week and he talked about growing up as one thing and becoming something new in Christ. A story that Scruffy has in common with him. My three sons did the very best quiet sitting that I have ever observed. Usually I must hover around them at camp saying things like: “Sit down. Stop bouncing on the couch and kicking your feet in the air. People don’t like you to sit on their heads and pull their ears while they are playing, boys.” And yes, I did say some of these things…but not the whole time. The boys are growing up into sweet little geeks that make their Daddy proud.

CamasCon is a strange and lovely time of refreshment. Fifty-three campers came, not counting my boys, with at least half of them being new. And yeah, Scruff has to transport his 200+ games back and forth twice a year. But to Scruff it is worth any hassle. How often do you get to play and worship with people who have a passion for exactly the same things that you do? CamasCon provides this service for the geeks that I love.

 

Boo Boo

 

 

First Spring Flowers

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We have a tradition up here at Camas Meadows.

The first flowers of spring belong to Grandma Autumn. There is still enough snow on the ground for my sons to dig snow tunnels, although I see bare patches beneath the trees. But spring is here. The first flowers never appear up on the top of the hill where Winter’s grasp takes so long to loosen. They push through the loam on the banks of Camas Creek Road as it twists up the mountain toward the meadow. For the whole month of March and sometimes into April, we drive by these sunny roadside banks at 5 miles per hour looking for splashes of yellow. Finally the day arrives. Bright yellow pine lilies appear on the banks and we gather the first few blooms of spring for my grandmother, Autumn Griffith, one of the camp’s founders.

When the first blossoms finally came this year, I handed the small bouquet to my youngest son and he took off like a shot, barefoot and coatless, for Grammy’s house. Because she had been waiting for this moment all month.

Just so you know, it is spring now at Camas Meadows. It may not look like it. But soon the melt will reach the top of the mountain and we will have flowers of our own blanketing the forest floor. Even though my boys are busy digging forts in the snow banks, we are confident that the advent of spring has occurred. The pine lilies have been found and presented to Grandma Autumn. The rest of the season is soon to follow.

 

Boo Boo