Fire Time Stories

" Few shared my place of origin or the events of my life, but many, it seems, shared my experience. Listening to their stories, I came to understand how women can be isolated by circumstances as well as by distance, and how our experiences, though geographically distinct, often translated into the same feelings. Away from the physical presence of my past, I found it easy to argue that what mattered most was the story, the truth of what we tell ourselves, the versions we pass along to our daughters."

-Judy Blunt excerpt from Breaking Clean



I went to Boston for two hours yesterday. One of my closest childhood friends came home from a year and half long voyage on a tall ship. She sailed the entire Atlantic Ocean. She saw the west coast of Europe and Africa. She saw South America and the Caribbean. I saw her last a year and a half ago right before she left. We never spoke ONCE the entire time that she was away.

In the train station, the T red line, on my way to see her, a man was playing one of our favorite songs.

John Denver, Country Roads.

I had a hard time finding her stupid boat. And she wouldn't answer her stupid Blackberry. Which is really stupid when there are one thousand big boats in Boston and lots of water and lots of harbor. I found her. Her boat was parked on Warren Street.

I should have guessed.

We grew up at summer camp together. Just like our fathers did a generation before us.

It was called Camp Warren.

I was less mad about how hard it was to find her, and realized it was my stupid fault for not looking up her pier on the internet before I made the four hour trek to Boston.

I would have stayed longer than two hours, but I had to work at 5am the next day.

Work trumps time to connect...

We still connected. After a year and a half of zero communication Sarah and I sat on a giant anchor on the corner of Warren and Constitution, smoked cigarettes, and relished the time that we had.

We come from the same story, Sarah and I. It's easy for us to connect. Sarah's mom was always sick growing up. She had a body sickness, MS, that made her unable to walk for as long as I can remember. Eventually it made her unable to move at all, but her mind was always alive. Right until the very end.

My mom had a mind sickness, Manic Depression, that made it hard for her to be level. She was happy, fun, exciting and really crazy. Or she was alone, quiet, sad and vacant. She always meant well. She still does, but the doctors and the pills and the alcohol took some of her away. Even still, she is not who I remember playing ponies with when I was 5.

For a long time I thought that Sarah was the only person who shared this with me.

The "mother sickness."



Sarah talked about sailing, and the politics of the boat. She talked about wanting to quit. She mentioned wanting to leave the boat after three months.She talked about the beauty of morning dips in the Caribbean. She talked about the cut-throat competition from one mate to the next. How hard it is to work together and against each other at the same time. In one moment to feel like a teammate and the enemy.

I talked about "the business." How lucky I had been. How hard it has been. How much of a fight against my peers and friends it has been and still is. How much pressure there is. I talked about the politics and the men. I talked about how working on set feels like being the only woman in a 1940's WWII platoon. I talked about how my femininity is worshiped and resented in the same moment.

In a week Sarah and I will be both be back at camp. We will be at Warren, at home. Where the community works together. Where all competition ends in a "Camp Warren Tie." Where gender is just apart of who you are. We will be back with our self made family. The place that we both went every summer for nearly 18 years, after nine months of coping with childhood, or adolescence or our sick mothers. It is where we would both go after not speaking for nine months to instantly reconnect.

Even though the distance between us was sometimes so great, and the Minnesota winter had been frigid and isolating. The first night at camp we would sit around a fire and tell the stories that we were ready to tell. Sometimes we would tell the stories we never thought we would be able to tell, and sometimes we told stories that we never even knew were in us.


To Sarah, and the other exceptional half dozen people that are in my life.

No matter what port you come from. No matter what mid-western city or northern hide-away you walk out of, or metropolis, or foreign nation you or I come out of next week, I cannot wait to sit around the fire and share stories.


It is your stories that you have passed along to me that have made my life connected, and devoid of a separation from love.

I am so glad that I will be able to share you and our stories with our daughters...

someday.