Chapter 10
After cabin cleanup, it was off to breakfast and chapel.
The rest of the day was mandatory activities like swimming, volleyball, making hammered metal ashtrays and pottery in arts and crafts.
My two weeks there reinforced what I already knew about myself.
I wasn’t skilled at making friends. When I tried, I was rebuffed.
It was better to be by myself. I felt far lonelier when with other people and always would.
I engrossed myself in making crafts and learned a valuable lesson.
To create anything that matters, it always starts the same way.
Lanyards are a good example. I made several at camp and each began with a swivel hook I’d fasten to a nail in a wall.
I’d braid the four colorful flat plastic laces into something long enough to wear around my neck, the finishing touch a square sliding knot for adjusting the size.
I got fast at making lanyards for my favorite counselors, and they’d clip their whistles to them.
I realized that no matter what I created, I had to start with a hook of some sort.
Without that nothing is going to happen. The same rule applies to writing a book. How to start? What’s the hook? Once I figure that out, I start weaving the story. Often the “hook” or scene I open with ends up moving closer to the end or is deleted. It doesn’t matter if it got me going.
My entire time at Camp Merri-Mac I was desperately homesick. Not wanting anyone to know, I pasted a big smile on my face during meals and activities. I pretended to be carefree and happy on bus trips to Sliding Rock, Tweetsie Railroad, the outdoor historical drama Unto These Hills in Cherokee.
I didn’t let on how isolated and out of place I felt.
I rode a horse for the first time and was thrown off, ending up in the infirmary.
I acted like I wasn’t hurt when I might have been.
My lower back and stomach ached from my crashing into the riding ring’s white picket fence.
I didn’t complain about the pain when examined in the infirmary, managing to fool everyone.
I seemed so upbeat and cheery that the counselors called me “Miss Sunshine.” Alone inside my cabin, I’d crawl inside my laundry bag to cry.
I never let on how miserable I was. I missed Dad.
I missed Mom. I don’t recall her coming to visit me at the camp even though it was less than a mile from our house. She literally could have walked there.
Merri-Mac was started by Alice Coburn, or “Macky,” as people called her.
She and her husband, Harold, lived in a sprawling white frame house at the entrance of the camp, and often she’d have me over.
I don’t know why she singled me out. Probably because I saw her at some event and struck up a conversation.
That was my M.O. with adults, and rarely was I afraid of them.
Sitting in Macky’s living room of antique furniture and Persian rugs, I preferred her company to kids my age.
Maybe because I had two brothers, I seemed unsocialized when it came to making friends with girls.
I was aggressive in sports, extremely competitive, and not the least bit interested in dolls or feminine clothes, especially dresses. That wouldn’t change as I got older.
For some reason, Macky Coburn took an interest in me. She must have known the details of what was going on with my family. Maybe she felt sorry for us or simply was kind. She let me stay at the camp basically for nothing, and I gave her some of the poems I wrote and pictures I drew.
It was due to the encouragement of people like her that I would continue my creativity.
I was praised for my efforts, and perhaps much of it was disingenuous, simply grown-ups being nice.
There’s not much left of my early writings and artwork.
Eventually, Mom would throw away most of it after my brothers and I left home.
What still exists today isn’t exactly Leonardo da Vinci or Hemingway.
Yet I was applauded for my efforts. When I’d write a story or a poem, people had a reaction.
I was motivated to continue my introverted endeavors, spending hours alone with crayons, pencils, and cheap paper.
The world I lived in was empty, and I learned to populate it with imagined characters.
I’d bind my illustrated stories into books with cardboard covers, a few of these self-publications surviving my mother’s purges.
The Magic Snowman who had a kind heart. The Little Bear who made friends with a chipmunk.
Another tour de force I wrote at the age of eight is simply titled Storys, the main character a happy cloud.
My Little Halloween Book features a dramatic scene in the forest between “a happy little gost” and an “old witch,” my spelling atrocious.
“Do not sit here,” the old witch said, but of course the ghost did anyway and got into trouble.
The witch knocked him out of the air, down to the hard dirt rather much like I did to Maria on the playground.
The books begin “Once A Pond a time” and end with everybody friends.
Despite what most people might expect, the stories I wrote during my early years weren’t tragic or violent.
But they were suspenseful, and I overused the phrase all of a sudden.
My inventions were the result of wishful thinking, an attempt at creating imaginary friends since I had no real ones.
My mother found my little books amusing, but I don’t recall her showing much interest. She saved a few of my early efforts in the scrapbooks she kept.
Most of my childhood I felt alone and was.
I learned to create worlds of my own, and my inventions kept me company.
That’s good conditioning if you’re going to be an author.
After a month in Mrs. Arnold’s downstairs efficiency, we moved into a rental on the remote Montreat hillside of North Carolina Terrace.
The ramshackle house was roomy and two stories, the crumbling rock wall in front strangled with ivy.
Our landlady, Miss Craig, was gaunt with yellow-stained fingers and a deep voice from smoking cigarettes.
Our new neighborhood was filled with spooky curiosities like the grand white villa peeking through trees.
Cold spring water plashed from the mouth of a bronze lion’s head in the rockery, the estate like something one would see in Italy.
As best I could tell, no one was ever home.
I wondered who lived there. It seemed a secret.
Across the street from it was a weathered shack, the doors padlocked.
My brothers and I would peer through the cracks of boards.
The luxury roadster inside likely was from the 1920s or ’30s.
Daylight seeping in dimly illuminated dusty chrome, flat tires with spoked rims and wide whitewalls.
A folded-down leather convertible top was festooned with spiderwebs.
Miss Craig looked like she’d stepped out of Hansel and Gretel and seemed to take a shine to me.
We’d go on romps in the woods where she introduced me to the fauna and flora.
I met rabbits, squirrels, chipmunks, all sorts of birds and wildflowers.
She showed me birch and sassafras trees, the twigs delicately spicy.
“A natural way of brushing your teeth,” she said while stripping off bark with a pocketknife. “Be careful of splinters,” she advised.
Carrying a small pickaxe and a basket on our hikes, she’d show me smoky quartz and garnets while looking for gold, rubies, emeralds.
Cleaving mica into fragile silvery sheets, she said it was used to make windows long ago, warning me about the abandoned mines hidden in the foothills.
I told her about the one Jim showed me, and she shook her head disapprovingly.
“Stay away!” she warned.
As we walked along creeks, she pointed out tadpoles, and salamanders that were speckled and striped.
A crawfish looked like a tiny lobster skittering along the mica-flecked silty bottom.
The black snake zipping across the path wasn’t harmful.
But copperheads and rattlesnakes were deadly.
I was to avoid poison ivy, poison oak, and briar patches.
Some mushrooms were fine to eat but best not to try.
And be aware of yellowjacket nests underground.
Should I get chiggers, cover the itchy area with nail polish until the little critters suffocate.
She introduced me to puff balls that when touched blow out clouds of dusty spores.
I tasted honeysuckle and touched moss that looked like green carpet.
Miss Craig confided that there were fairies in the woods, and now she really had my attention.
“What do they look like?” I wanted to see one badly.
“Very small with wings. They’re very shy and don’t trust most folks.”
Determined to be the exception, I was careful and polite around decaying stumps. When I’d see a hollowed-out tree, I was respectful, figuring such places might be where the fairies lived or hung out.
“You know what this here is?” Miss Craig asked one morning, and she seemed excited.
She gently lifted a tender stem, its billowy pink blossom reminding me of a pink balloon.
“This here is a lady’s slipper.” She smiled proudly. “And it’s what you classify as a rare woodland plant.”
She carefully dug it up by the roots, placing it inside her basket.
“What’s this called?” I pointed to glossy heart-shaped leaves and tiny white flowers.
“Galax,” she said.
“Can I pick the flowers?”
“No! You never pick nothing!” She shooed me away with a sweep of the pickaxe. “You always dig things up by the roots so they can be replanted.”
She led me to a stream, and we followed the fern-covered bank. Suddenly, she stopped and knelt near a rhododendron bush.
“Glory be! Why come see, Patsy!”
I knelt next to her as she pushed aside a branch, pointing at a single delicate plant.
“A Jack-in-the-pulpit.” She spoke in a hushed voice as if we were in church. “You don’t see them very often.”
She pointed out the striped hood that was the pulpit. Jack was the spadix or spike inside.
“What’s Jack doing?” I leaned closer.
“Why, he’s preaching a sermon to all the other plants and animals in the woods!” She sat back on her heels and laughed.
I leaned even closer, and Jack had no hands or mouth. He didn’t look like he was preaching at all, this faceless man inside a green-striped hood. She dug that up next, gently pulling the hairlike roots from the loamy earth, placing Jack into her basket. We waded through more tall ferns and grasses.
Sticks cracked under our feet as we stepped around mountain laurels, ducking under pines and low branches to the constant sound of water trickling over rocks in the creeks.
She introduced me to fairy wands growing near a tree trunk, telling me they were magic as I looked for the ethereal winged creatures that might use them.
“You can close your eyes and make a wish,” Miss Craig offered. “And if you’re a good little girl, it will come true.”
She laughed as I squeezed my eyes shut, saying a silent prayer to the fairies and their wands.
“Please let Daddy come soon… Let him come now!”
I counted to ten before opening my eyes, and my father was nowhere to be seen.
I wasn’t a good enough little girl. That’s why I wasn’t granted my wish.
The Jack-in-the-pulpit stared blankly at me, not caring.
As we headed back to the house, the basket bobbed with plants, and I asked what she would do with them.
“Sell them, sugar pie,” Miss Craig replied as we moved in and out of shadows.
She instructed me sternly never to kill a lady’s slipper or a Jack-in-the-pulpit. They’re protected, and it would be a crime, she threatened. I wasn’t sure that was true but took it to heart. Whenever I’d see one of the rare plants she’d pointed out, I gave it a wide berth.
At the end of our first summer, it was time to move again. Miss Craig’s house wasn’t winterized, and she would return to where she lived off season. I’d lost my companion and guide. She was my only friend. My family packed everything we had back into boxes and suitcases, loading up the car.
When it was time to say goodbye, Miss Craig was busy on the front porch, a broom in hand, her short gray hair covered with a red bandana. My brothers sat on stained grass matting, looking at Jim’s tropical fish book, pointing at photographs and whispering.
“I wish y’all would git!” She shook the broom at them. “How do you ’spect me to sweep the dirt off the porch when you’re sitting right in front of the door?”
My brothers weren’t fond of her, and I’m guessing a lot of people felt the same way. She was peculiar, according to my mother. Why had Miss Craig never married? Or if she had, what became of her husband? For sure, she was crabby, but I was used to her eccentricities and oft-time irritability.
Accustomed to seeing her daily, I’d look forward to our adventures and tutorials. Miss Craig made sure Mom had the address in Mississippi where she lived most of the year. Our final rent payment was due, and as soon as Mom got her next check from my father, she’d take care of it.
“When you can,” Miss Craig told her. “I ain’t in a rush.”
Our last time together was a downhearted occasion. She gave me a mini pickaxe, and picture books of local flora and geology. I would keep them for years, using the pickaxe to dig up rocks and hammer them open, hoping to find gold or something else of value.