Lost and found

We keep a lost and found box at camp; please check it even if you don’t think you’re missing anything. After camp, we leave behind everything that looks to us not terribly important, such as plain white T shirts, broken sunglasses, socks, and towels. We drag the remaining sweaty muddy items to the laundromat, hang onto everything for a month, then poke through it to see what we want for ourselves and haul the rest off to the Goodwill, never to be seen again. So, if you get home and discover that you’re missing something, let us know right away. We’ll ask you to send money for shipping and our time, and when we receive it we’ll ship your stuff home. (We charge a flat fee of approximately $10 for anything under 2 lbs., more for heavier stuff.)

(The moral of this story is: it's far, far better for everyone if you make sure to collect all your stuff before you go home. The giant boxes of fabulous clothing and such that we routinely haul away from camp are one of the great headscratching unsolved mysteries of our universe...)

Parents, you might want to make sure that all your camper's possessions are labeled. A staff person who proofread this page shared the following memory--name changed to protect guilty party:

I'll never forget the moment when we were modeling lost and found items, and I noticed a name written on the tag of the jacket I had been parading around in. "'Hey John, is this yours?"

"Huh? No."

"It has your name in it."

"Oh, wait, yeah. Thanks.'"

We also suggest that you make an agreement or a plan with your offspring regarding how they're going to make sure they arrive home with everything. It's expensive for you (and unpleasant for us) to track down missing items after camp is over.

 

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