sing around the campfire, pt. 1
when i was 9 my my sister came home from a two-week sleep-away camp. she talked about the campfires, the dances with boys, the group picture, something called canteen, the sailing and the songs, and about all the people who were now her friends from other places. she didn't mention kp.
i didn't know anyone from another place besides a couple of cousins, and wondered what it might be like to meet folks i hadn't known all my whole nine years.
the week before she left, she packed a footlocker full of shorts and matching tops, sneakers and bathing suits — another thing i couldn't imagine — packing your whole self up and willingly spending 14 days away from family. where you hadn't already figured out that a witch did not in fact live in the linen closet. where you couldn't fall off to sleep listening to the sounds of your parents in the family room. she was the bravest girl i'd ever known.
i must have asked to go. surely they wouldn't have just sent me to camp without my permission. parents didn't do that, did they? but there my mother was, washing and pressing all my clothes into crisp squares (she has this habit), and we packed the metal trunk full, with socks and clean underwear, stationery and stamps, leaving just enough room for the sweatshirt i was bound to want from the camp canteen.
i had never been away from home for more than a night or two.
but we set off through the countryside. it was a long way, turning down a sandy road in the middle of pines, tall and straight. we drove by a spot in the sandy pine forest where my sister said the devil left his footprints. right outside an episcopal church camp? i hoped there was a fence strong enough to keep the devil out.
suddenly, we were there, driving through the gate, and i looked up at the sign: camp leach. leach. would there be leeches in the water? I wondered. (i doubt i'd learned to spell it right by then.)
we were barely passed the first cabin when my sister jumped out of the car, headed to find her counselors. i stayed close to mama, unsure. i could see the river before me, white clapboard huts scattered about, the masts of small day sailers peeking up from the water.
i don't remember much about that day. just mama making up my bed and me climbing to the top, where i could see into the bathroom and the showers where there were no doors.
i did know somebody — a girl in my class from church — she was supposed to be my friend— but i was scared of her most of the time. i looked around at the strange faces that would be my cabinmates for the next two weeks and missed the faces of my friends from home.
i think it must have been at supper when the end of my adventure began. i don't drink milk, and so when they put a carton in front of me at the table, i ask for water. nothing doing. drink the milk. and then i started thinking i'm sure about how mama would put a little vanilla and sugar in my milk to get me to drink it. that thought led to watching mama fix supper and the softness of her apron and it was all pretty much over by then. and the tears fell.
somehow i got to sleep that night, and by day things seemed just a little bit better. i met a girl named penny and took her picture with the camera i had brought.
i can't tell you when it turned again, but somehow i found myself on the phone with mama, and i was wailing. despite the fact that the counselors had taken me sailing and swimming and walking around the camp on my own personal tour. we'd had our camp picture made and heard ghost stories by the campfire and i was there for all of it — for a whole three days. but by that time i'd had enough of trying not to miss home, so there i was again on the phone, begging, pleading. come get me. i'm dying here.
and so she did.
oh i know you're saying right about now that the only thing to cure a homesick camper is to leave her there and make her tough it up. well, that's probably what my mother should have done, but i can pretty much bet that even when she wasn't on the phone with me she could hear my crying, two hours away, through those pines. and you can bet that i was making everyone around me miserable.
she drove the wagon into the camp yard and i was waiting, my trunk packed inside the cabin. my sister once again combed the grounds looking for her counselors, drinking in the smell of the Pamlico, begging just as hard that my mother let her stay in my place.
go get your trunk, mama said, and her words melted into me. i was going home. finally. I ran up the short steps and somehow filled with a new-found strength lifted that thing up by myself and straggled out the door.
that's when i saw the dust clouds. clouds kicked up by mama's station wagon, headed toward the gate. she was leaving me. it was not her finest moment.
i guess she thought seeing her would be good enough medicine, that it would buy her another three days without me at home. days of quiet. if i had been my mother, that's what i'd have thought, too.
but that's what you get for thinking. i was what today would be called a high-strung child, and that translated into a loud and crying one most of the time. at that point in my life, i hadn't found my writing voice, but i had found my voice, surely i had.
so i saw those dust clouds, and i used that voice. screaming. don't. go. don't. mama. wait. please. take. me. home. it embarrasses me to admit what a baby i was.
and i ran. faster than i had ever tried, ran to catch up with her. i can't tell you whether i was running with that damn trunk or if i dropped it in the sand.
then i saw the breaks, lit up like the tree in the early hours of Christmas.
she stopped, and i got in the car, satisfied that i would no longer be held prisoner in this place where i couldn't get so much as a glass of water, and i was going home.
whether you are the mother or the child in this story, there are no good answers. yes, she should have made me stay (probably never should have come in the first place, or shouldn't have thought i was ready or whatever. ) and no, i shouldn't have cried until all that was left was the driest of sobbing in order to get my way. i don't know about you, but i've been that mother who no matter what i did, it would be the wrong choice.
and as for the child, sometimes there are no good answers there, either. no good way to get around what you're feeling except
feel
.
i was grounded for the rest of those two weeks, where i was content never to be too far from my mother's soft apron as she stood at the kitchen sink. i never went back to camp — never wanted to — but i suppose i am glad to have provided my family with a source of laughter whenever we gather around the holiday table.
my children went to camp and loved it, though when i left them each time, i spent the first 10 minutes crying my eyes out, imagining them feeling abandoned. but they never called home.
in the years since, i've found my voice and learned (sometimes) to temper my tears, so i could leave home, finally, for more than a sleepover. and on a warm July day in 2001 i dropped the kids off at camp and went on an adventure of my own. for five days i traveled coastal north carolina and virginia, promoting my first book.
on the third day of the trip, i stopped in a small bookstore in elizabeth city, where a line had already formed near the door. i began signing books for students at a local school, one of whom had the last name 'spence'. oh, i knew a girl once named penny spence I said aloud. a suddenly a voice near the back of the line lifted above the din.
'i'm penny spence,' said the brown haired girl i had photographed in front of our cabin way back in 1967. 'do i know you?'
'well, probably not,' i said. 'we went to camp together, but i only stayed three days.'
she didn't remember me, but that was ok. that meant she didn't go home from camp telling her mother about the crazy girl who cried all the time and ran after her mother's car, screaming to beat the band.
writemuch.blogspot is the original work of author susan byrum rountree. all written work and photography is copyright protected and can only be used with written permission of the author.
Put On Your (Pity) Party Pants (I promise, I did write this yesterday)
Ok, so I've read some of the Reverb10 posts and realize I am supposed to BREAK THE RULES with these questions, and not write them uncomfortably straight, like yesterday's post. But uncomfortably truthful.
I would be a little late on the uptake. Like I am with just about everything this year, especially Christmas. No tree, no decorations, hardly any gifts. (Who has time with all this writing I'm doing? I just can't multitask like I could in my 30s and 40s, I'm just saying.)
Though the weddings I attended were FAB, Anna and Ardeth, that's not what I will remember here.
It happened just last night. It was lovely. I went to my first ever book club meeting at a friend’s house. As I write these words, I think how can it be that I have, at 53, been invited to join my first book club? All my friends are in book clubs, some of them in more than one. I've been invited to read at book clubs, but never to join. (Ok, might this be pity party # 2?) A wise friend told me recently that I might intimidate people because I'm a "writer," well, do they know that this writer reads her fair share of trash, has actually bought a copy of the National Inquirer (once), that the high brow books I read I often don't understand? Not to mention that it is embarrassing the number of books I haven't read on that list of BBC books that most people have only read six of floating around on FB. (For the record, I have read WAY more than six. But Madame Bovary? My mother would never have allowed me to read that. I had to get special permission to see Romeo and Juliet at the Dixie Theatre because Leonard Whiting was bare bottomed. Not to mention Olivia Hussey's bosom, but I had seen at least two of those by then.)
Anyway, back to the Party. I love my friend. We've been friends for 20 years, and I have admired her all those years. She's a great mother. She is intentional in her actions.
She is beautiful, has a beautiful house and everything looks like pottery barn and her husband is a cabinet maker (as a hobby), he built some of the cabinets in their living room. He is also a husband who can fix anything at all, and one thing he fixed (that I covet) are these beautiful cabinets over her kitchen computer station that are back light (not with florescent lights, mind you) but soft lights that reflect on the artisan pitchers and plates she has on display. They have a mountain house (that I have been invited to twice) and they cut their Christmas tree down from the mountains and it is 10 feet tall), and she made us Christmas cookies and everything was CLEAN, even with a dog in the house and the lights are all perfectly low and the children's Christmas handprint wreath pictures are all framed and over the fireplace, (somewhere in my boxes yet to unpack, my children's handprint wreaths are curled on dowels.) And she had carefully preserved other special Christmas artwork — the adorable burlap pillow cross-stitched with a Christmas tree comes to mind —I have the same one somewhere, if the dog didn't chew it up a couple of Christmases ago. And she had ordered special huggers for our wine glasses with the name of the book club on them, and there were lights everywhere and she has stenciled the wall with a special Christmas saying about singing loudly that she created, that apparently just scrapes off without leaving a scar on the wall when Christmas is over, (if I did it, it would indeed scar), and, well, can you tell that when I die I want to come back as her?
As I moved around her house, admiring every corner of it, I couldn't help but wonder, what do I have to offer my friends, really?
I came home to kitchen counters filled with lists and bills and nary a twinkling light glowing, save my husband's computer screen, and the florescent one over the kitchen sink, and I guess if I tried real hard I could imagine its light emanating from the Star of Wonder all those years ago in Bethlehem. And I had two missed messages from my husband saying he couldn't, then could, figure out the DVR so I wouldn't miss Sing-off while I was gone. And I just looked around at all the dust and scratched up floors where the dog has played catch me if you can and I had myself a good ol' fashioned pity party, with nobody but myself in attendance, remembering a time when you could practically eat off my floors my house was that clean. What happened to that girl?
And while I pitied, I watched Sing-off (aren't those guys from Committed amazing?) marveling in fact God gives some people the ability to sing better than a bird, and though I have always wanted to, He didn't give that to me, and in the midst of the pity, I realized what I did get, right in front of my eyes in this beautiful home but I had failed to see.
My friend Pam. I have known her, too, for 20 years, and being a Yank, she is a stitch. She has made me laugh ever since we coached our daughters' OM team together, way back when they were in fifth grade. And she told me how she went to the airport to greet the WWII veterans who took the Flight of Honor a couple of weeks ago. Her father, a WWII vet is no longer around to take that flight. One of the giants in my church did though.
And Martha was there. I have known her since Miss Lottie Smith Welch's kindergarten. I have been waiting to see her for a couple of weeks, to talk about her son Ryan, in Afghanistan, and to share news that I have connected with one of our long-lost classmates, whom she will want to see. We hugged, (twice) knowing there is no friend like the ones who have known you when you were just you, and have loved you anyway.
And Grace was there. We walk our dogs every day at 6:30, a.m., have for I don't know how many years. Two dogs ago for me I think. It's been so cold this week we have stayed snuggled under the covers instead, and I have missed her company. When we went around the room to share our favorite Christmas traditions, she said church on Christmas Eve. It's the same for me. We have the same dishes, the same colors in our houses.We joke sometimes that when we get old, we'll move around the corner to the retirement home and combine our things. They would easily coordinate. We were suite-mates in college. I have known her that long.
Two of my neighbors who have children getting married next year were there. I don't see them often at all, even though they live just through the trees. Both are funny, characters in their own right, and I love seeing them, listening to Karen talk about her favorite residents in the retirement home she runs, and Margaret about her extended family, all of whom live in the neighborhood, or nearby.
And there were a couple of women I don't know well, but whom I know will, over discussions about books, will give me great food for thought.
Why do I do this to myself, needle until I find the ways I fall short, instead of celebrating the fact that my friend opened her home and invited me in? That she drew together a group of women who are important to me, and gave me the chance to reconnect?
And so, just a bit ago, I pulled out the candles to put in the windows, and since it is me, a few of the bulbs were burned out, and when I went to the store to get them, I forgot to get them. So there you go. But when I drove back in the driveway, the candles lit the windows like stars.
Christmas is coming. And even if I can't get the scratches off my floor, the presents bought, the greenery hung by the time it arrives, there will be much to celebrate.
sbr