I spent many an enchanted summer at a receding-bluff, no-regulations-capture-the-flag, co-ed, Christian, make-out camp named after a made-up(?) American Indian, but one summer a few years into my overnight camping years I decided to tack on a session at Camp [redacted] for Girls, my mother’s alma mater. I wore her color, blue, and learned her Blue Team songs about dying blue or dyeing blue—I never read the lyrics—and sewed and danced for the Blue Team. I must also have eaten Pop Tarts for the Blue Team, unfortunately, because I gained eleven pounds, unless that was also the summer I went to visit the Livingstons for a Jeep trip around Iceland and ate all that fatty fish with decadent cream sauces. That was what my mother would like to blame for the weight gain anyway, though something like Pop Tarts were the probable culprits there too, because the Livingstons had proper snack food, unlike anything we were ever allowed at home. Also I don’t think it was eleven pounds. I think I was eleven years old, and that eleven was also a quantity I’m remembering of snack foods, perhaps of Pop Tarts–perhaps a daily quantity.

I rarely eat Pop Tarts anymore, and if I do, they are likely the wonky homemade kind, because I’m so uptight. I can’t imagine I was uptight back when I was running through the woods in the dark on my way to a camp [redacted] Indian Raid, or digging through damp laundry and melted remnants of my grandmother’s Scotcheroos from a care package for my Powhatan (not camp name) feather, and certainly not when we were older and on staff night and [redacted (;] How did none of that laid back stick? I also managed never quite to pick up smoking or playing the guitar. Yet it took only four weeks at Camp [redacted] for Girls to cement, at least in my fascia, all the habits my mother and grandmother had been gently browbeating into us at home with raised eyebrows across the Sunday table or shoulders squared unsubtly along a church pew. Every day for a month I woke up with the bugle and, I think, immediately put on a uniform, only to make my bed with hospital corners so that it could pass pre-breakfast inspection by–I’m going to say Betsy, because it’s a believable camp counselor name. This one went to Sidwell Friends which, adorably, meant nothing to me at the time. It was everything to her. She wore her maroon and grey Sidwell Friends shorts anytime she didn’t have to be in some sort of official camp dress. She didn’t have her own song.

Ever since then, my hips have been locked, which is probably why I had to stop pursuing ballet around that time–unless it was the all the Pop Tarts–but it is definitely, according to my myofascial therapist, the reason I have developed this current debilitating pain in my left quadriceps. Christine insists at a certain point we must all take responsibility for our own problems, but I’m going to blame the hip thing–and by extension, the quad thing, which really ends up affecting the whole leg if I’m running up a hill, or anywhere fast–and then, you know, because of the effort, just affects the whole cardiovascular system, and also affects anyone nearby of course, because I have to talk about it—I’m going to blame all that on hospital corners. It turns out it made me very, very tense when I realized people besides my mother and grandmother did that, and that I would always need certain things to be a certain way before I could relax. I know, Mother (capital M)–something here has been punctuated incorrectly. And I know it’s killing you! I promise not to sleep well.