Mia Rubenstein
Though I’ve often taken them for granted, the most beautiful things to me are the memories I’ve made with people I love.
Every summer for the past 11 years, my family has gone with our close family friends to a family sleep-away camp: Camp Michigania. The camp runs for 11 weeks, and each session lasts one week.
Our annual tradition is to meet at the BP on Plymouth Road to caravan the four-hour drive to camp. As we get closer, we drive up the hilly roads lined with trees and turn onto Camp Daggett Road. We smile, clap, and cheer as we drive past the Michigania Rock to the Ed Center, where we put our names on maize lanyards. We drive to our cabin where the parents unload the overstuffed cars and yell for the kids to form an assembly line to bring the luggage to the rooms. We unpack, make beds, set up fans, and highlight activities of interest on the printed schedules.
We run to the dining hall because the food at camp is nothing like home—Michigan Waffle maker, omelet bar, fountain juice drinks, crepe bar, warm chocolate chip cookies with fro-yo, Lucky Charms, Cinnamon Toast Crunch, and chocolate muffins. And always, it’s an all-you-can-eat buffet style.
Throughout the week there are numerous activities—archery, riflery, horseback riding, rock polishing, field sports. Most of my mornings are spent swimming or boating; Camp is situated on Walloon Lake, so campers take out sailboats and stand-up paddle boards and play on the beach making sand castles. My friend Asher and I often talk with the lifeguards in the freezing cold water.
In my afternoons, I spend time with my mom at Ceramics/Arts & Crafts (CAC). CAC is a candy store of art supplies. Tables of people sitting together fill the perimeter, and glazes organized in columns by color sit on the back wall. There is a room full of ceramic pieces to purchase and glaze, and tie-dye is open all week outside a side door. Screen printing examples hang on the walls for inspiration. The room is full of chatter until 30 minutes before meals when staff play, “Closing Time” and “Bye Bye Bye.” I still cherish a ceramic ice cream bowl and matching cone spoon that I painted and fired.
Every year, my mom and Asher’s mom make matching picture frames that hold our annual Michigania picture. Each frame has to do with that week at Michigania. For example, one year it rained the whole week, so the picture frame had raindrops all over it. In 2020, we didn’t make a picture frame, so the following year, my mom made a frame to hold a picture of just the Michigania rock with no one around it. The frame itself had “6 feet” written on two sides with arrows in opposite directions pointing to family names in each corner. At the top, “2020” was written with the first zero as an image of the coronavirus and the second zero an emoji-like face with a mask on it.
Spending a week laughing, singing, and bonding up north at Camp Michigania with the people I love has been one of my most beautiful memories.
Ivy Miller
I was nearly six when “Frozen” came out. In early elementary school, I went from wearing exclusively pink to adding shades of “Elsa blue.” Never before had I identified with a character so much – Elsa was a strong, independent older sister with a long braid.
My wardrobe soon saw an avalanche of icy blue drive out the pinks of the past. I received a pair of hand-me-down navy blue track pants from Wes Lovelace, an older boy who had grown too tall for them. I paired the pants with my metallic Messi indoor soccer shoes: they were gor-geous. My signature hairstyle was a pair of tight Dutch braids that were ready for anything and everything soccer. From the playground to Wide World games on a boys’ team, these clothes traveled everywhere with me. I felt beautiful because I felt strong.
While every inch of Elsa may “tremble, but not from the cold,” Raynaud’s Syndrome was soon to claim my extremities. My blood vessels overreact to temperature changes, constricting to turn my fingers white, red and blue. These episodes are called vasospasms. The tri-color changes are tantalizing, but dangerous nonetheless.
The ice-cold irony rekindled my love for “Frozen.” I began to understand Elsa’s struggle to regulate her magic – “Conceal, don’t feel” – especially since many brain chemicals also act as vasoconstrictors. In upper elementary and middle school, I felt too old for the movie, however, as my relationship with colder temperatures evolved, the girl who worshiped Elsa returned. I like to think that my white fingertips have been struck by a beautiful, icy magic. Elsa’s powers are a gift from loving sacrifice. The initial shock of my vasospasms has worn off and they connect me to my younger, ice-loving self. “When all is lost, then all is found.”
Mallory Towers
In sixth grade I knew who I was; I was the orchestra kid who never practiced her music, the sixth grader taking seventh grade math, the girl who always talked about starting a band with her friends.
I was happy. Then I wasn’t.
When the pandemic started, I lost all sense of who I was. I could no longer define myself by the things I did or the people who surrounded me. I went from being around friends who shaped my beliefs every day to being stuck at home with nothing but my thoughts. I felt empty. No matter how many times I looked in the mirror, I only saw a stranger staring back at me.
I tried everything to find myself again. I cut my hair and changed the way I dressed – but it wasn’t me. Since I couldn’t spend my time connecting with people at school, I turned my attention to the internet. It wasn’t long before something on my YouTube homepage caught my eye: makeup tutorials. These makeup looks were so much more than just the simple lipstick and mascara combo my mother wore to work, they were pieces of art. Eyes painted in shades of vibrant greens and blues, eyebrows sculpted masterfully with concealer and lips sporting deep reds adding the perfect contrast to every final look.
I begged my mother to take me to Ulta Beauty to buy some supplies. I had no clue what I was doing, but that didn’t stop me from filling up our cart with a foundation way too light for me and the brightest eyeshadow palette in the store.
When we got home, I raced to my bedroom and plopped down in front of my mirror. I began to beat my face with a beauty blender as I layered on powder after powder. Every brushstroke was purposeful: they defined the creases and lines on my face. My eyeliner was chunky, and I had put on way too much highlighter, but I didn’t care.
I looked in the mirror and for the first time in months I knew who I was. I was beautiful.
Wilson Zheng
Every single morning, it’s been the same thing, the same routine: wake up, dress, sometimes eat breakfast. After that, it’s always nine minutes down the same street to the same bus stop, always waiting for five minutes before taking the same bus to school.
Nine mornings out of ten, I’m tired. I wake up at six in the morning after sleeping for only five hours because of late nights; I don’t want to do anything. I pull out my phone, fully charged from the night before, and start scrolling mindlessly: while eating breakfast, while walking, while on the bus, everywhere, at any time. Scrolling is easy. It sucks you in with its inescapable bursts of dopamine. It’s addicting; that’s why I do it, that’s why everyone does it.
Online, I see videos of nostalgia: walking through the knee-height snow back home, drawing hand turkeys in class, seeing the bright bus headlights through rain-smeared windows. Sometimes, I see videos of cute cats doing random things. Other times, I see stunning sceneries of places I will likely never visit, and I wonder why my life can’t be that beautiful.
One day, on my walk down to the bus stop, soullessly staring at my phone like always, I decide to stop. I put my phone down, down, deep into my pocket, and I stare up into the sky, met with the twinkling stars and smiling moon staring right back down; I stare towards the ground, seeing the colorful bright orange and red maple leaves being pushed down the concrete sidewalk by the crisp autumn wind; and I look around me, seeing the dim street lights faintly illuminating the beautiful, dark twisting neighborhood roads I’ve become oh so familiar with.
Maybe, I think. Maybe the answer’s always been right there, waiting for me to find it.
