Camp. A place to make friends, learn to swim and sail, take an overnight hike, sit around a fire and tell ghost stories. Hearing the word brings up many associations: name tags sewn into your clothing, sleeping in musty cabins, and rafting down a lazy river. I'd been to overnight camp when I was growing up, and knew about other types of camps, such as logging camps and hunting camps. I was also aware that summer camp in Maine was a tradition for thousands of kids every year.

But it wasn't until I traveled to the state on a road trip this year and serendipitously happened to read an essay in Down East Magazine that I learned about another type of camp. In "Just Like Glass" Amy Wright Chapman explains that, in Maine, camp can refer to what those "from away" might call a cottage, or lake house, or summer home. To a native, though, camp is all of those-and none of those. Camp is a Maine state of mind, a place where families and friends return summer after summer to spend time together, enjoy the beauty of nature, and settle back.

Wright Chapman spent her childhood in Connecticut, but in her words: "...all the usual growing-up things took place there [Connecticut], but we all knew that our real lives happened at camp," camp for her family being a summer place on a lakefront lot in western Maine.