Chickadee

I'm getting my next tattoo on December 2. It's going to be a fat little chickadee.

When I was little, I was part of the youngest group of campers at Noyes Camp. There were three age groups - Chickadees, Naiads (from Greek mythology, nymphs of flowing water), and Bacchantes (after the mortal women who dedicated themselves to the cult of Dionysius). As you might guess, the camp was what I would now call "crunchy," with roots in the work of Isadora Duncan, also known as the mother of modern dance. Duncan freed traditional dance forms such as ballet from their rigid structures and rules in favor of improvisational and interpretive forms of movement.

I first attended Noyes Camp, also known as Noyes School of Rhythm, in the late 1970s. My mom, a dancer and educator, was completing a master's degree in the summers at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, and the camp was located just six miles away in Portland, on the other side of the river. This meant she could bring us to camp and go focus on her studies for a few weeks each summer, knowing that though I was very young to be at sleepover camp, my sisters were there and she was nearby.

My memories of camp reflect how young I was there. Everything is amplified -- the giant rock in the middle of the field in the lower part of the grounds, which I found was not so giant after all the one time I went back to walk around in the early 1990s with a boyfriend. (He had surprised me with a motorcycle ride to this place he knew had been formative for me.) The smell of rain, the dark of the cabins and the glow of fireflies, bats in the rafters, and tying a sock onto the ends of our cots if we wanted to be woken to see an eclipse -- this was all part of the magic of those weeks away from home, when the rest of the world fell away and in its place, we donned leotards and home-sewn silk tunics that swirled in the summer breeze. Scott Joplin ragtime on the poorly tuned piano in the pavalon, which you arrived at from a narrow path through the woods, ferns as tall as your head on either side tickling your arms and legs along the way. Mealtime, when once a week there would be awards for best manners and best posture, a great source of pride for their recipients and something to aspire to throughout the week. 

At the time, we called it an "all girls camp," and the counselors and staff were all women. (I can't help but wonder looking back whether some would now identify as nonbinary or trans; it seems more than likely, just as historically women's colleges have expanded their notions of the binary when it comes to gender). But at the time, all I knew is that I felt safe and held in the company of girls, sisters, women. I was at home in the barn, feet sweeping against bare wood. In the small lake, with its the tangled, dangling roots of lily pads that flashed white, pink, and yellow as they floated atop the green surface. In the cold showers we took each day, save Sunday when we got to spend a few minutes soaping up under a stream of hot water. In "horizontal hour," or naptime, which to this day is how I remember that horizontal is the flat one and vertical the up and down.

My middle sister belonged to the Naiads and our older sister was a Bachantee. The Bachantees were teenagers who might as well have been grown women from my vantage point. I remember the specialness of sitting in one of their laps as the light slipped from the sky and sparks from the campfire flew close to our circle. I remember learning the word "kindred" from a cherished counselor, though her name now escapes me. I wonder if she remembers that, too.

 This place of free expression shaped my young body and mind in ways that clearly took root in me. As I grew, I found myself pushing back on conventional beliefs and norms around creativity. As a teenager, some years after we stopped attending Noyes Camp -- my sisters had outgrown it, and by then, so had I -- I quit taking piano lessons, resistant to the discipline advancing would have demanded. I tried cello and loved it, but quit that too before long. The story I've always told was that I was impatient, perhaps rebellious, perhaps too much of a perfectionist to tolerate the necessary slog through years of rudimentary, repetitive exercises. Of course, I appreciate now that these are necessary when developing a craft. But at the time, I just wanted to play. Not only play as in play my instruments, but play as in do what I wanted, follow my impulses, lean into my own ways of making music and writing poems and moving my body. I did not want to follow anyone's rules or adhere to what I perceived to be outdated and elitist ways of how things should be done. I wanted to be free.

At Noyes Camp, that impulse towards freedom was not only honored; it was the whole point. This was at odds from a young age with a certain unstated expectation that if you had "gifts," you would get the kind of training that would hone them. I was deemed a "gifted" child on several fronts, but I also had a stubborn streak of wanting to do things my own way. The same went for learning foreign languages; you'd sooner find me in a coffee shop with a dictionary and notebook, making lists of words and trying my hand at bilingual poetry writing than joining a club at school. At 16, my senior class voted me "most likely to make you look and wonder," a superlative that accurately reflected my distaste for being boxed in or pinned down. 

I tried to fit in. I really did. But I also might be lying a little as I type those words, to myself or to you or both. What haunted me was a sense of un-fulfillment. I was good at things, but ditched them when they got too hard. I was passionate and full of emotion and unexpressed internal worlds, but I found it difficult to find an outward manifestation of these that felt right, thus leaving me to feel adrift and existentially bereft. By my early 20s, I read Emily Dickinson poems on the floor of my three-room, ground-level brownstone apartment in Brooklyn and cried. I was lonely and my poems filled journal after journal and I no longer danced or felt like part of any community.

I've lived in New England more of my life at this point than not. From the ages of 9 to 17, Amherst, about 75 minutes north of Noyes Camp. From ages 26 to 38, Burlington, Vermont, then back to Amherst again in 2012. The intervening years, 17-26, saw stints ranging from three months to three years in Mexico, Southern California, New York City, and Boston. Through it all, I've been working my way back in some ways to the purity of the experience I had as a Chickadee in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Or maybe purity isn't quite the right word, maybe it's something more like belonging. Yes, belonging. To the woods. To the friendships. To the simple structure of each day, with a time to dance, a time to swim, a time to make art, a time to read, write, and rest, times to eat, and time to dream.

A tremendous amount of privilege undergirded that experience, just as privilege defined most everything about my growing up years and has followed me into adulthood. I am thankful for the ways in which I got to feel that free from such a young age, something every child should know but many never will. My hope is that my newest tattoo of a fat little chickadee will serve as a reminder to do what I can in this life not only to keep moving closer to my own voice and free expression, but to use my gifts to help others do this, too, especially those who didn't have a Noyes Camp in their early years, or ever.