We humans form emotional attachments to many things, automobiles, animals (both stuffed and sentient), lucky socks, and sometimes, whether they like it or not, other humans. Like many of you, I had a teddy bear when I was growing up that I apparently was quite attached to. His name was CBS.

Apparently, I had an attachment to one of the three television networks our rabbit ears were able to pull in as well. There is a vast amount of “things” that have came and went into and out of my life over the years, but I still have CBS. He’s in a trunk in our basement, along with a few other things that have managed to hang around from my youth.

Of all the emotional attachments that have formed, deformed, and detached in my life over years I never expected a campsite to make the list.

I spent two weeks holed up off the grid in our camper in a lovely little secluded campsite in the Black Hills. I’d probably still be there, but I still have some responsibilities in need of my personal attention in the civilized world. So it goes.

Before I uprooted the camper from the site it had dutifully occupied for two-weeks, I took a stroll around the site to bid farewell to all that had kept me company. Abraham Lincoln once said that a bore is someone that relieves you of solitude, but does not replace it with company. The campsite was “boreless” with company and solitude a plenty.

As I strolled amongst the trees that had offered me shade during the day and softly sang in the evening breeze I swear I saw their evergreen boughs slump and their crowns dip as if to say, “ahhh you’re leaving?”

The little stream that was a constant companion offered accompaniment to a farewell song…“The Parting Glass”…the song I used to sing to the cabin each time I prepared to depart. Yeah, I sang to the cabin, it sang to me too, before it lost its voice to a wildfire.

Perhaps the cabins parting has opened up emotional attachment space within for other places of solitude? That’s what the chipmunk suggested as it thanked me for the peanuts and pistachios. Wise little fellow.

The campground has about eight campsites, and even though I didn’t visit with the many people that came and went over the two-weeks I was there, I often wondered where it was they came from and where it was they went when they left.

Introverts aren’t uninterested in others, and indifferent to their comings and goings, we’re just quietly curious from a distance, and only get close enough long enough to possibly borrow something of interest from your life to ponder and potentially write about. That’s how we say thanks. Thanks for allowing solitude in a world that is so often so noisy.

So as the days of summer creep steadily towards the days of fall, I find myself hoping to attach myself to all that that place gave me once again for just a little while. Just a little while. Sometimes that’s all it takes.

Hope your summer is progressing slowly and has been sprinkled with a bit of solitude and a bit of company.