Camp was the best week of the year. Somebody else made the plans. You showed up, and by the second night you had friends you'd keep writing to.
Then you grew up and nobody plans anything for you anymore.

Here's the thing, though — you already have the friends. You've been in these women's comments for years. You've celebrated with them and worried about them and never once been in a room with any of them.

Camp Claire is the room. Two nights at the beach in Delaware in October, when the crowds are gone and the light gets long. Claire's hosting. Forty-eight lobsisters, and this is the first one there's ever been.

You don't organize a thing. You just come.
Friday is the Glow Up Party, and it's exactly what it sounds like. You walk into a room that's been set up entirely for women who never get set up for.

Seaside Wellness is on hand all night. Your B-12 shot is included in your ticket — the one that actually makes a difference in how Saturday feels — and if you want to go further, they'll have IV drips and their full menu of wellness services available right there. Get the good stuff before a weekend at the beach instead of after.

The Sister Market is local women selling things, the kind of pieces you can't order online because there's only one. Shop it early, shop it late, it's open all night.

There's a bar with beer, wine, and champagne on us, and a mocktail bar with a real bartender.

Dinner. Then Claire gets up and pulls the pieces she's obsessed with right now — what she's wearing this fall, what she's returning, what she'd tell you to buy in the size you actually are. The part her comments have been begging for, live, in a room, where you can ask.

Then coffee, dessert, and however long you want to stay in that room. Most of you won't leave when it ends.

Saturday starts slow on purpose. Yoga if you're up for it, breakfast whenever you wake up, then the whole group heads to Milton to thrift. Real thrifting, two hours of it, the kind where somebody screams from across the store.

Then off to the beautiful and rustic Lavender Fields at Warrington Manor, and the whole day changes temperature. There are goats. There are chickens. There is a greenhouse where we'll have lunch with the sun coming through and somebody playing guitar in the corner. Cider you can wrap both hands around, and that first real fall air on your face when you step back outside. Cait walks in and tells you about this place and how it came to be hers.

Then the afternoon is yours — walk it, wander it, sit down somewhere and don't get up, find something in the Cottage Store you didn't know you wanted. Wear the flannel. And late in the day there's the labyrinth, and we fill it with a sound bath session. That one's the healing part. You'll know it when you're in it.

Saturday night we're on the sand in Dewey, and the ocean in October sounds different — bigger, emptier, like the whole beach belongs to you. Dinner as the sun goes down. Then we light a bonfire, and this is the part I can't fully explain to you until you're standing there.

Everybody gets a piece of paper. You write down the thing you've been carrying — the one you don't say out loud, the one you've been hauling around so long you stopped noticing the weight. Nobody reads it. Nobody asks. You just walk up and put it in the fire and watch it go.

And then Claire hands you your patch. Looks you in the eye and puts it in your hand.
That's the moment. Forty-eight lobsisters, salt air, warm on your face and cold at your back, nobody checking a phone. You'll be talking about that fire in five years.

Sunday you sleep in and say goodbye properly.
This is the first one. Forty-eight spots, and everyone in the room this year is a founder — the patch says so, and it only exists once.

Shell yeah, lobsisters. Come sit by the fire.