Taylor

Taylor made me laugh. She was pretty pretty quiet in the first few days, and spoke quietly when she voiced an opinion. Then on Tuesday of week two, all of LITs packed up food and canoes, and went on a canoeing trip. That night we pitched tents in a campsite at the end of the mapped out trip and sat around a fire telling life stories, and Taylor truly opened up. The rest of our LIT session, she was cheeky and bright and had more to say. She wasn’t as afraid to speak up for herself and she generated some good ideas throughout various situations. She was good at taking charge and making everyone help with a cookout, too. That skill helped a lot when we were hungry and tired at the end of a long day. Taylor would assign a role to each person cooking that night and got the food made more quickly.

My favorite memory of Taylor was from week two. (Context: the LIT boys’ cabin, Alpha, was nicer than the girls’ cabin, Chinook. Alpha had been remodeled earlier that year, with nice tile floors and new windows. Chinook was an old bathroom, with insects in the window sills and squares of carpet covering a concrete floor. To top it off, the boys got a nice wooden stool to use to climb into the upper bunks, so they didn’t have to vault into bed at night and risk hitting their shins on the metal bars.) At the end of week two, the girls had had enough of it. There had been light talk of taking the stool and seeing if they noticed, but there was never time to actually do it. Then late Friday night, I went to the bathroom with Taylor so she could take a shower without walking in the dark. On the way back, we peeked into the fully lit Alpha cabin, and all the boys were asleep. We found our counselor, Jordy, at a picnic table talking to other counselors. He gave us the go ahead. We crept up to the back door of Alpha, creaked open the screen door, grabbed the stool, and ran giggling all the way back to Chinook. We kept the stool the rest of the session, which was only fair, not that the guys really cared anyway. Still, the glee in Taylor’s voice when we stole a chair at 12:30 is unforgettable. How this memory adds to Taylor’s character, or teaches a valuable life lesson, I’m not really sure. But it’s a story that shouldn’t go unshared purely because it was so fun, even in our sleep deprived state. Taylor is thoughtful, hilarious, and a smart leader.

Stay awesome, Taylor.
Claire

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