Susan Megna is a community writer, mostly personal essay and memoir, who lives with the nagging urge to write.
She is now retired and splits her time between Castleton-on-Hudson, NY, and Fort Collins, Colorado, where a couple of her kids and her grandson live. She travels with her cat, Georgia, who tolerates this because she appreciates no longer being hungry, scared, and feral.
Susan is currently downsizing to a lock-and-leave apartment near Troy NY, a change to make more time to travel, read, make new friends, ski in winter, volunteer with the iconic Saratoga Performing Arts Center in summer. And, to write.
Six decades later
By Susan Megna
Around Easter, three years ago, a Facebook message crossed time and space straight from my 1950’s childhood:
“This is Naomi from Radnor Road. Yesterday I blew out egg yolks to make Easter eggs the way your mother taught me. . .”
I liked my neighbor Naomi - a gentle girl with curls and beautiful freckles, a soul open to the world. Her family’s glass backyard porch was built around an oak tree trunk – so the tree could live on. We lost touch after 6th grade graduation; the break solidified after I moved upstate for college, and then for the rest of my life.
“I don’t know if you remember me, but we did go to girl scout camp together one summer session.”
Naomi raised it again in a catch-up call a while later:
“Do you remember when we went to camp together? For me, a wonderful memory – I loved it. They made me a birthday cake, and everyone sang – I was so happy.”
I did remember Naomi, but I did not remember camp. All I could summon were a few foggy glimpses. I couldn’t ask my family about camp because not even one of them is still with us. Memories from early life are mine alone now, there is no one around to refresh, dispute, expand, or validate my recollections.
My house has a ton of storage space, so it’s been easy to disappear things, including a couple of dozen worn receptacles of old photos from my parents’ house. Those boxes and bags sat up there for thirty years, untouched and unorganized, stuffed under the attic eaves. When Naomi reached out, I was staring down the task of un-archiving all that clutter. Three years later, still at it, I hit a jackpot trove of forgotten photos from summer camp. The pictures were taken by me, with my beloved Brownie camera. They are date-stamped August 1962.
And here we are: twelve-year-old half-grown girls, posing in our tents, doing the limbo, building human pyramids together, standing solemnly for color guard, loving on Herman the resident duck. The photos are blurry but less so than my memories had been.
I sleuthed out the name of the camp – Camp Andree Clark, in Briarcliff Manor. Looking at the photos, I am reminded that Andree Clark Scouts were a diverse group – many of our camp buddies were Black. It fits with what I have now read, that Girl Scouts USA made a well-documented, effective push to desegregate its camps and local troops during the 1950’s and 1960’s.
Living in the woods with those girls from different places and backgrounds probably did far more for us all than the early desegregation motions at school after 1955 Brown v Board of Education. There, Black kids were brought in each day on a separate bus. Within the school walls, they were led off to be taught 100% separately from the rest of us – separate classes, separate lunch and outdoor time, separate field trips. Even then, I thought this seemed to defeat the purpose.
As I think about this, it feels like time for another call with Naomi, maybe a real visit. Pre-teen girls together outdoors, learning new things, meeting new people…it’s a special bond. Memory may falter but can regenerate - with a little push through a bond like that.
The girl at the other end of the bond is still here. She seems exactly as she was in camp sixty-two years ago, open, and free and generous. Six decades ago, we were together in the summer woods. And we were also on Radnor Road, painting flowers and chicks on empty eggshells.
That first message from Naomi is one of life’s rare little treasures.
“… just know I have a thought for you and your family at surprising times – girl scout cookies, pine needle forests (summer camp), blowing eggs for Easter… just know someone remembers you and your family, fondly.”