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.

nobody's fool

anyone who has known my husband for more than 20 minutes long knows he is no fan of travel. I say that with a caveat: it's the to and fro and not the destination that often finds us ready to change our plans and head to the nearest divorce court home.  if we are driving, whether it's to church or to the peach state, he drums the steering wheel, tries to pass on the two lanes just where i know he shouldn't, fumes at drivers around him though the only person who'll hear him is me. flying can be worse, what with automated check-ins and tarmac delays, tiny aisles and arguing toddlers punching our seats from behind. (there, now, honey, don't blame me for the fact that you forgot your iPad!)

i'm thinking if only we could sail to where we're going, a thousand arguments over the past 32 years might never have happened.

sail. that's what i said. if we could close the back door and head to the dock, step on board and sail ...  away. 

well, that would be my husband's solution. i'd be busy searching google for the nearest five star hotel with a boat landing, spa and freshly-pressed sheets to break up the trip.

the skipper, as we call him, got his first boat some 15 years ago, and now we (he) mans boat #6. this last one we (i) named Fortune's Fool, because the skipper certainly has spent more than one fortune on his beauties boats and their many accoutrements. (i have used this information when i want to buy myself high-priced boots or cameras — i don't have a sailboat, i whine, and not once has he ever said go get one.) and no, i didn't really mean anything by choosing a name connecting my husband's prized possession to the world's most famous star-crossed lovers. really.

when i married him just 11 days shy of 31 years ago, the only boat this skipper had ever been on was my father's Boston Whaler, and in my memory only once... (my daddy loved that boat, and when he sold it, my mother threatened to lie down in the driveway to keep the buyer from pulling it away. so when the skipper said he wanted to buy that first day sailer, i knew what i was up against.)

i should have planned our wedding date better. he has spent at least one of our wedding anniversaries at the annapolis boat show, though i'm not complaining. really.

well, sort of. i thought that first boat would be the end of it, that he'd get the water out of his bones and take up golf. he sold that boat, buying a new one (slightly soaked) before the old one had even left the yard. and he kept on selling and buying until he had to hire a crane operator to put the last boat in the water. whether it was the skipper's naivete or the boats' fault, i was never sure. he kept saying he was buying bigger and better boats for me.

this, from a man who grew up landlocked. he didn't particularly like the beach, though he has come to understand my need to talk to the ocean from time to time. yet he drives an hour one way down country roads to get to his beauty, and only always when i am along rarely does he try to pass the slow poke. he is that happy to be going.

i don't go sailing often enough for him. he brings his little cooler into the kitchen on a saturday morning and i count how many hours i can nap chapters i can read in the hours he'll be gone.

i like sailing. once we are on the water and i have a cool beverage and friends to laugh with and cute cocktail napkins with sailboats on them to serve with my provisions ... i really do. it's the prep and the hauling to and fro and the sweating in the cabin on a very hot summer day that just spoils my outfit, face and hair. it feels like camping to me, which leads me to camp, the memory of which still haunts me, so more often than not, i've stayed at home.

but two weeks ago, i woke on a saturday to a stiff breeze and 60 degrees and it was just too pretty to nap read. 

'i'm not going to take you if it takes two hours to provision!' the captain barked. 

was stopping for a sub sandwich to put in an itty-bitty cooler too much trouble?

apparently not. i even took my new sailboat camera, hoping to take some pictures for myself him to show his sailing buddies. and as we sailed in the crisp wind, the skipper started telling me about the new mistresses boats he had his eye on. seaworthy. as in the atlantic.

oh dear.

the skipper has a big birthday coming up in just over 40 days. when i asked him what he wanted to do, i knew it would involve sailing. so we packed up our grips and headed to the airport (it was too early for anybody to be on the road, though as usual he couldn't get his card to work in the automatic check-in) so he didn't really grumble about it too much.

skipper jr was in tow, and the three of us met up with the pea and her prince not without major angst from the skipper trying to find the rental car place and a parking place along a crowded street on the aft deck of a restaurant in Portland, Maine, where all you could see anywhere was two- and three-masted schooners, sailing, sailing. we could feel the tension lifting just a bit.

we'd made a reservation to sail on a three-masted schooner in boothbay harbor, maine, at 5 o'clock — an hour from our current port o' call — and we were late. we zoomed ahead of the kids, the skipper weaving in and out of traffic again, me wishing i'd brought a life vest in the car to keep my delicate skin from bruising as we cruised.soften the impact of the to and fro.

i texted the pea: where are you? knowing the skipper would be crushed if we missed the sail because of their dawdling. 'we are going as quick as we can' she wrote back, and though she didn't say 'dad needs to chill' i know she was thinking it.

we reached the boat with 10 minutes to spare. the kids and i sat, me promising our few days in maine would bring us a new man, now that he was on the water. i'd seen it happen just last year.  i sensed they didn't believe me.

then we set sail (with a captain and first mate), and as the boat yawned, the skipper smiled. he talked. he chatted it up with the captain. he leaned on the rails. he laughed more than a few times, put his arm around me even, watching the water, the sails stretch, giving way to his love of this thing that only he can really understand.

the kids were amazed, that the secret to calming their father's stormy demeanor was as simple as water, canvas, wood and wind.

on our second day, we climbed aboard another boat, this one motor-powered, and headed into the vast atlantic toward a tiny island off the maine coast. the skipper stood on the bow in his yellow slicker, watching the swells and looking for all the world like a lobsterman scouting out his traps. and he was smiling, once again.

later and back on land, the skipper eyed a burgee flying with the colors of our seaside respite. that would look nice aboard the Fortune's Fool he said more than once.

taking the hint thinking ahead for once about his Christmas list, skipper jr inquired at the front desk as to where he could acquire said flag for his dad, but there was none to be had. a day later, i asked the same thing, and of course so had the skipper. i found myself wondering how we might have one made as a surprise.

it was spitting rain at checkout, winds skating over the bay at close to 20 knots. time to go home. but as the skipper headed into the the cottage for one last walk-through, i saw him toting the burgee. the innkeepers had somehow found an extra, so they handed it off for the promise of a good review on travelocity.

our week was, to use a boating term, quite yar — as katharine hepburn said in the philadelphia story. (My, she was yar...easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be, until she develops dry rot. ) and so was the skipper.

if you don't count the money we spent or squeaky floors of our cabin, or the fact that in the wee hours of our last morning, someone quite large and ungainly in the adjoining cabin took a tub bath, and we heard every slap squeak against the fiberglass tub wall. and the groan when they tried to stand up.

it's a rainy day, but guess where the skipper is? off to pat the fortune's fool, to mend her lines and set the halyard flying. 

i'm hoping for a few more days of yar before the dry rot begins. and i'm searching my new iPhone maps to see if there indeed might be a way to sail wherever we are headed next.


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.

Welcome Happy Morning — this is not an Easter story, well, not really

This morning I woke to my dog sniffing out our bedroom window at the wind. He does this every morning, rising usually before the sun is up, and now that it's warm enough for us to sleep with the window open, he sniffs. If you watch him, his nose is the only thing on his body that moves...often he keeps his eyes shut tight against the rising sun, so he can get the pulse of the morning. What creatures may have traipsed through our yard in the night, who (meaning neighborhood dog) has already walked by before day was up? Has his friend Sookie walked by without him? Is there a new girl dog in town? And I like to think he is, after living all this time with me, listening to the birds. He sees things with that nose, that it takes a discerned human mind to detect.

It is Easter. I love Easter. The new chance for everyone. All church and new birth, hymns and lilies, all the welcoming of this happy morning and the trumpets and drums. The Good News. I used to take my kids' pictures every year in their Easter outfits, and today I have looked through the Facebook postings of my younger friends — of dying eggs and fitting heads with bonnets, plucking flowers from the yard for the Easter cross, and I just miss it. Just plain miss it all over the place. The whole making of the Easter Bunny cake and the jelly beans in the basket that somehow don't ever get eaten, even that. (Now I just keep a bowl of jelly beans on the counter, and they disappear.)

But Easter is not Easter without church for me, and in the past few years, our church has become so crowded on Easter morning that we have found ourselves at times so pinched in our seats that we wondered if we could find enough welcome in our morning to say "Happy Easter!" (Please, don't say: what a Scrooge!)

So in the past couple of years, we have chosen the Easter Vigil, an ancient service that starts with fire in the dark and ends with trumpets and light, and a welcome, for the day that is yet to rise. And room in the pew. So that's what we did last night.

Mind you that this has changed my entire Easter tradition. The whole dying of the egg thing, the baskets with straw, the lamb after the morning service. This year, like the past few,  our daughter and her husband were not here, so we had lamb chops on the grill before the Vigil, broke bread with our son in the back yard with the bluebirds flitting in and out of the box. Not at all a bad thing, but different.

And today, well, today, instead of church —and because we had already celebrated the Resurrection — we went sailing.

My husband is a sailor. On Saturdays, he heads due north (in the car), an hour away to the Fortune's Fool, which (six boats, different names ago) I accused of being his mistress. I've calmed down about that a bit now. He has his Saturday sails and I have my Saturday writing and reading and naps, (my laundry), and only on the prettiest, windiest days do I feel guilty that I am not with him.

But today... well, today, we planned it. Looked at the weather forecast five days ago and planned our whole weekend around our afternoon sail. Our son, who lives in our same town but you would never know it unless he is hungry, came "home for the weekend," for church, for sleep, to eat, to sail.

It is a rare day when the three of us are together, untethered to anything but each other. And on a sailboat, in the middle of a windy lake, well, that's what we were. Tethered. Or at least I imagine that's how he felt at times during our weekend.

Our son often thinks we are idiots, bumbling middle-aged folks who can't possibly have one interesting thing to say, not one inkling of a creative bone between the two of us. Honestly, what do we do with our lives when our children leave us to start theirs? I can't possibly imagine.

I took the new camera I am still trying to learn how to use,  and he said it's too dark to capture the Whooping Crane I saw. (He does know how to take pictures, and he was right.) When the boat veered too close to shore, his dad said: see any Indians? My 24-year-old threw back that he "was 24-years-old," and his dad needed to cultivate a few new jokes. He was, again, right.

It was not a day of crisp conversation, as it would have been if Big Sis had been aboard. I spent much of the time with my eyes closed, listening to the wind, or watching the clouds (I am working on a children's book with clouds as the main characters, but though I read renditions of this book to him as a child, did I share it with him? No... )

But none of this mattered, because we were together, the three of us, breaking bread in a boat with the wind whipping and the sails furled and the clouds spinning all around. (I did once or twice think about the story of Jesus visiting the disciples after the Resurrection, as they sailed and fished, but would have left with empty nets, had he not told them to fish from the other side.)

I sat, as two of the most important men in my life worked in tandem to manage that wind as it filled the sails, whipped them round and about and round again, my hands on the dog. (We were only scared once.)

On the way home, the dog sat in my lap, exhausted from hanging on. (There is of course another story as to why.) I watched my two men in the front seat, silent except on occasion, trying to find piece of my son in his dad. They don't look much alike, but if you know what to look for, it is there.