Elizabeth Bayou-Grace is the co-author of the poetry collection, Fire in Paradise with her father Steven Lewis. Her work has appeared in print with Sixfold and on the radio with Writers Read. She has performed at Wakarusa Music Fest, Round Top Poetry Fest, Art Outside Festival, and Stubbs BBQ.
Elizabeth lives in beautiful Western Massachusetts with her kind husband and their ancient cat and nervous dog. She’s an alumnus of both Warren Wilson College and Texas State University. She is a proud aunt, avid yarn enthusiast, and occasional folk singer.
Elizabeth is working on a memoir, Bad Bones, a coming of age story through a lens of disability.
Flock of Peculiar Birds
By Elizabeth Bayou-Grace
At Camp Chinqueka, my best friends called me Graceful Swan. Graceful, for my real middle name, Bayou-Grace, as well as my propensity for tripping, stumbling, and otherwise flailing about our all-girls summer camp in rural Connecticut. And Swan because we were all hoping I wasn’t a duck.
This name, though pointed, was a name of love. We were a cabin of oddballs, both at camp and in the eleven months a year we wished we were at camp. Inside the sacred walls of our wooden summer home, we found a sisterhood of the strange with each other. From wearing our underwear on our heads, to flashlight illuminated dramatic readings of Angus, Thongs, and Full Frontal Snogging¸to multi-day matches of the card game spit, we carved out a space for our brilliant, bizarre selves.
One summer, a trio of us recreated the cult film sensation, Clerks, using a camcorder and early 00s video editing technology. Instead of the Quick Stop, we used our daily snack shack, the Canteen, as our central filming location. I had never seen the movie, but I lied, and shoved a pillow under my shirt, paired it with an oversized coat and played a majestically silent, Silent Bob.
We debuted our film at the talent show, where the counselors wept with laughter and our fellow campers stared at us in silence.
We knew we were weird; I just don’t think we had any idea of what an anomaly we all were. Unbeknownst to our tween selves, none of us were going to grow into the women we had seen modeled in our lives around us. Each one of us was going to buck tradition in one form or another. Our crew consisted of a future lesbian who posts mostly body positivity content these days, a future engineer, a future ju-jitsu trainer, a future cross-fitter with two master’s degrees, a future fine jewelry designer, a future non-binary sci-fi writer, and me, a bisexual, disabled poet. And none of us, as we race into our late thirties, have become mothers, yet.
While we’re still ripe to make babies, or otherwise find ourselves as parents, and we may, I’m shocked when I realize this. Statistically, we’re not alone, but we do defy the odds. According to birth records, 2023 showed the lowest birth rate on record in the United States for forty years. Still, on average an American woman will give live birth 1.6 times.
In my old girl scout troop, for instance, I know at least four of us are actively mothering. Of my college friends, a small but sturdy crew, three out five of us have a little mini-me or two running around. Women I went to high school with, and women I was a wild-eyed eighteen-year-old with, and women I met in graduate school, and women I’ve waitressed with, and the women I knit weekly with now at the library, all of these groups include mothers and non-mothers alike. But not my misfit camp crew.
After we first aged-out of camp, we still occasionally kept in touch. I’d see the future lesbian at the annual Gay-Straight Alliance state-wide conferences in high school, and the future ju-jitsu trainer once tried to set me up with the only goth boy from her class. The double-degree wielding cross-fitter and I still have a coffee once every other year. But otherwise, we’ve slowly lost contact, save for social media.
I think this makes it all the more remarkable. That as we flew our separate ways, as we migrated miles from our nests, as our downy baby feathers molted, that we each found a pond to call home.
They called me Graceful Swan, but it turns out, none of us were ducks. We were a flock of peculiar birds, lucky to find each other, however fleeting.