Catching the bus from Boston to Camp Firefly Falls with the other campers had not been the plan. She lived north of the camp, on a hobby farm in upstate New York where she grew lavender and heirloom perennial flowers. When her daughter, Tegan, announced she was getting married at the camp, Grace had planned to drive down for the weekend.
But Tegan had different plans. She’d arranged for Grace to attend camp the week before the wedding as a so-called “treat” for the mother-of-the-bride.
Grace liked the idea of camp. She just wasn’t sure how she felt about the theme of the week. She didn’t feel like she was in her fifties most of the time. Ever since her divorce nearly twenty years ago, she’d felt like age had become nothing more than an abstract, meaningless number.
Or maybe that was simply her stubborn refusal to accept her ex-husband’s toxic framing of aging as a bad thing. Regardless, she had mixed, complicated feelings about attending senior’s week at camp, and while she enjoyed dating as much as the next single woman, she didn’t have aStarCrossedprofile like the people around her.
So, a week ago, she’d set out for a quiet road trip where she’d intended to end up in Briarsted and Camp Firefly Falls this weekend after some necessary solitude and reflection. But her car had broken down at an artisanal cheese farm in New Hampshire and she’d spent the last day and a half figuring out the best place to get it repaired without disrupting Tegan’s wedding countdown.
The last thing she needed was to stress her daughter out with minor details like her car being stuck in Nashua.
She’d figure out how to get back to it after the wedding.
So she’d gone to a mall, bought the biggest backpack she could find, shoved everything she needed for camp into it, and hopped on a Greyhound to Boston, where she knew she could get on this bus, which she’d wanted to avoid in the first place.
But that was Grace Bennett’s life in a nutshell. No matter what she did, she could never dodge the lemons. Every internet meme about life’s hard lessons making one stronger both spoke to her and infuriated her at the same time.
Therefore, once she’d arrived in Boston, she squeezed in some sightseeing because, hello, it wasBoston, and how often did she go on an adventure like this?
Lemonade. She was a pro at mixing it up nice and sweet.
“Canoli?” She smiled brightly at the woman sitting behind her and held out the first box. “Pass them back. I bought enough for everyone.”
She handed the second box to the gentleman across the aisle from her, then she sank into her seat and let herself breathe.
In and out, focusing on her heart rate. In a few hours, she’d be at camp. And then she’d find a stiff drink.
