For a large chunk of my life, the end of June meant one thing: Cross Point Resort. This trip was simply called “vacation” by anyone privy to the week-long stay in the Northern Minnesota woods. Nobody ever needed to ask “which vacation?” because it always seemed to be the only one that ever mattered. Indeed, my entire school year seemed to revolve around this one week (kind of like an inverted Harry Potter scenario).

To me, this place was home. The resort sat slowly crumbling into the shores of Lake Lida. Most years the shower water trickled cold, windows stayed painted shut, the bugs covered more of our skin than the sun, and spiders set up camp right beside our bunks. But I never cared.

I’d first tagged along to this place with my best friend and her family when I was 14, about to start my first year of high school in the fall. The last time I saw it, the flaking cabins shrinking to crimson dots in my rear view mirror, I was 20 and about to start my last year of college. I grew up there. Yet, I feel like I didn’t actually grow until after I left. But more on that later.

Within this annual tradition was another tradition by the name of Scoops. If Cross Point was my universe, then Scoops was my sun. Scoops was an ice cream shop in the nearby tiny town of Pelican Rapids, with old-school black and white checkered floors, sparkling red vinyl chairs, and had the overall appearance like a Coca-Cola ad from 1956 threw up all over it. Scoops was never said as “Scoops,” as a mere word spoken in an everyday, mild-manned tone. Scoops was always said as “SCOOPS”—a statement, a demand, one syllable filled with childhood excitement and wonder.

We were young. We were surrounded by ice cream and candy. This was the truest form of love we knew at the time. But really, it wasn’t about the ice cream. It was about the feeling that filled the spaces between us when we sat at those vinyl chairs licking happily away at our Moosetracks. It was about the laughing in between the slurping. It was the way the sunlight lit up the waffle cones until we thought we had gold at our fingertips.

Our second to last year at Cross Point, we arrived in town to find Scoops gone. The mural was washed away and in its place was a sign for an insurance company. I think this was the first time we realized life was metamorphosing in front of us and we had to adapt to whatever shape it made whether we wanted to or not.

A year later, Cross Point’s reign, too, was ending. We promised we’d continue the tradition, of course, in some form, somewhere else. We promised to keep the bonfires burning, the boats running, the songs playing. But “Vacation” could only ever be Cross Point Resort, and I haven’t seen my fellow vacationers in years.

I was crushed when I had to say my last goodbye. I hadn’t realized yet that it was necessary.

During many of our sun-soaked days on the waters of Lake Lida, we filled our hours with floating. There comes a time, after you’ve inflated the neon fuchsia plastic, carefully lowered it and yourself into the lake’s surface, and closed your eyes to the sun’s own burning stare, that you eventually open your eyes and look up. And you realize that you’ve drifted much farther than you thought, and shore is just a distant line dotted with tiny cabins in the horizon.

That’s what it felt like in the time after Cross Point. I felt like I was drifting aimlessly away from the place I truly belonged. But if you let yourself drift far enough, you hit the opposite shore. And sometimes, you’ll find you’re better off. It wasn’t until after I left my yearly safety net that I truly started to grow up and discover what actually matters in my life. Of course, I still miss it. Over the years everything became so constant and familiar before nothing was constant or familiar. Once in a while I still long for that familiarity; for the feel of Lida beneath my fingertips, for the cool touch of an ice cream cone to my lips, for the communal laughter around a campfire. But every year, on the last week of June, I realize it’s all still here—every sense, every moment. I just have to squint across the waters to see it.