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.

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frantic

the piano tuner came on that thursday afternoon in 1996 as the wind whipped the oak branches around. off-key scales lifted through the house, and as i opened the front door to take a look, the door flew out, away from the house and i thought it might leave its hinges.

it's gonna be a strong one, the tuner said as he left, eyeing the sky. Fran.

Fran, 1996, when she hit raleigh

that night i couldn't settle, worried about what this hurricane might do to us, as we waited in the night a little more than 100 miles inland from where she hit land. the kids were sleeping, and my husband told me to chill, but then a tree slammed our deck and shook all the windows, so we  grabbed the kids up and headed down to the family room, bundling up and listening to radio reports of flooding and trees down all over town.

 lightning flashed without sound through the 13 windows across the back of my house. i could hear my grandmother's voice: why in the world would somebody want so many windows in a house? transformers blew all night. pow. pow. trees fell. pow some more. until the winds calmed at dawn, and we finally slept.

the next morning huge oaks littered our yard like so many pickup sticks, clutches of dislocated leaves plastered against the house and windows so we could hardly see out. down the street, trees lay on Grace's house as if God had set them down gently, knowing she'd already lost much to a tornado a few years before.

we were the lucky ones. power back in after only a few days, no trees on the house exactly. just everywhere we looked.

today i have been pulled toward the news about Sandy, which in just a few hours time will slam into the doorstep of the pea's building on the upper west side of Manhattan. this morning i sent them in email about making sure the remembered to charge their phones and iPads before turning one off for safekeeping, so they can still communicate with their worried parents. god, such a mom i can hear them saying. 

sure. a mother who has lived through a hurricane's howl. one who never, ever in her life wants to be witness to that again.

be aware of the closest shelter, i said. do they even have flashlights? i imagine their reality tomorrow of walking the dog down 10 flights of stairs (and back up) in the pitch dark when rain and wind are still sweeping the streets outside.

i am worried. i am praying. they are thinking of where they can have supper tonight.just wind so far, says the text. well, it's the wind you worry about first.

i've known that sense of folly, when the tv folks cry what seems to be entire packs of wolves, so many that everybody ignores their pleas to provision, except to gather enough food and drink for a pretty good party. 

i hope the weather guys are wrong this time, but all the while i hope, i see that nautilus cloud churning and churning her skirts closer to shore, not yet losing her shape.

sandy

Sandy hasn't even left north carolina yet, but she twirls ever so slowly into virginia, maryland and new jersey — she is that big. she has lazily meandered more than 1,500 miles up the coast despite her modest cat 1 strength. has taken just under 100 lives so far, two of them, it appears, plucked from a sinking ship off the north carolina coast today. now, she is more like a steam engine as she heads into shore, finally, to all who sit in wait.

Fran, when she barreled into north carolina in 1996 was a brunhilde of a storm, ursula in the little mermaid the pea used to watch. but Sandy's girth — and her wind — add to my worry. 

so we sit. we wait. we watch the skies. hope the weather guys are wrong. and pray for the safety of all.

ps: Tuesday morning: all is well on the Upper West Side, though much of lower Manhattan is under water. thanks for all the prayers and inquiries. We will wait to hear more.  

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.

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if the shoe fits

the flightaware tracker shows my daughter has just passed the chesapeake bay on her way north. she'll be back in the city in another hour, reunited with her husband who himself has flown over the pond today from france — and back into the caverns of the skyscrapers they call home.

i have a ritual. i always say prayers for safe travel (both in the air and in the NYC taxi), for her safety on the streets of this city she really does love. and i will never get used to watching her leave home. leave here. home.

when she first met her prince, the pea had a part-time babysitting job that paid her just enough money each month to afford a cheap ticket to the city, where he worked after college. it's a phase i told myself then, as i dropped her off at the airport that summer. but james had all things on her list including some she had never thought ought to be on it. he stayed and so there she went, too, after college. 

six years later, they are still there in their 4th apartment (we really like this one) and it is home to her. a place not just to lay the head down at night, but where she put her first real rug and where she cozies up to the dog at night. every friday they head to Deans for supper, where the wait staff knows their names and their drinks and eats. and where friends keep the dog when they are out of town and where she feels safe enough on a thursday night to leave her apartment at 11:30 p.m.— when her husband has been gone all week to france —and grab a cab at the corner and head to a friend's house and return at 1 in the morning and not worry one thing about her safety.

good thing i didn't know about that until she told me yesterday. i do think her sweet dog was upset for me though. i have grabbed a cab myself at that same corner in the early hours of a monday morning, and it scares me to think of it. but not her. 

i will never get used to this. the parenting of adult children. the fact that every decision they make no longer has my face in it. 

my mother told me when i went to college that she would be looking in the window, so i'd best behave. there were times when i looked out my dorm room window and imagined her face there, looking, judging, but unfortunately it didn't stop me from all that college allowed. but i probably thought about what she said much more often than she imagined i would. (still do). 

i told my kids the same thing. watch out for my face. i think they both turned into the room, though, not looking out so much until we no longer paid the way.

i am no longer looking in the window, though sometimes i wish i could, as they make their own lives. i'm just watching from afar, amazed at what all they do when they share some bit with me. (though i do give the old parental advice, to which they pay little attention. what do i know?)

flightaware now says 'arriving shortly', which means she is circling away from the skyscrapers and out, over the hamptons then back again because everybody else who needs to get into the city from a weekend away is now circling, too. (the husband is making his way (we hope) from a different airport (and a $50 fee) where he will likely be "home" before her and exhausted from a week of eating the world's greatest food.

home again. home.

my husband and i went to a wedding yesterday, that of a neighborhood beauty who married a boy she had known since kindergarten — though they had both traveled and seen the world and dated other people until they reconnected a few years ago.

at the celebration, i talked with a neighbor whose daughter was at first birthday party i remember giving the pea in the neighborhood. amanda lives in san francisco, has a great job, is thinking of moving to hawaii or south africa or whoknowswhere...wherever the job takes her. 

as mothers, we talked about what we loved about our girls. and about the fact that the very thing we raised them to be  — independent — at times breaks our hearts because they are doing the very thing we wished they would. leave home. see the world. be who we couldn't be in our own time.

+++++

i sit now at the kitchen table where i raised my pea to be the girl who was always wanting to see more. i look at the flowers i bought for the table because she was coming, think more than once about how i probably shouldn't have done my job so well, that if i had faltered, she might want to be closer to me.

++++++

on friday, i took her to a store i'd visited a week before alone, to get her opinion on a dress i thought didn't look awful on me. ('you need spanx' she said, and i was wearing them already but WHATEVER!) 

she would have been honest with me and said no, mom. don't. but she didn't.

and this morning after church i donned another dress i'd bought weeks ago, asking for her approval, once again. as i modeled, i caught the face of my mother, not looking in the window, but looking at me, for the same validation not that long ago. does this look okay? do i have the right shoes? 

there are some shoes only a daughter can fill.

++++

there was no special reason for the pea coming home. just every now and then she wants to, and we help make that happen. every now and then, all she wants to do is be here. sleep in her bed, scratch the dog's nose. shop with me. sit at the breakfast table. and that keeps me. for a good while.

i cooked. she did laundry. we broke bread with her brother. she saw her godmother and two great high school friends. she shared a breakfast biscuit and coffee with her dad. we visited a parade home (which she will have to explain to her northern friends) that had a closet bigger than her living room. which we laughed about. we talked fabric and whether or not we could live with that particular color of gray on the walls. 

that's a mighty big closet!

and our little family of four went to church, and i marveled that she remembered at least some of the liturgy. 

and the only picture i took with her in it she is barely even in.

when we parted ways this afternoon, i didn't cry. we will see her again in a week at a wedding, and then again in three in the city, when the husband runs the marathon! (i refuse to call it her home.)

landed finally, she has no doubt walked the dog and reunited with the husband and gotten her gift from france, and tried on her new boots, bought at home. 

and i miss her deeply.

those of us tethered to the South i think, know you live places but you are always from somewhere and that place is always called home.



homewritemuch.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.

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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.

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