The Parlor and the Pines:

Etiquette for Surviving a Dual Identity

Set in the vivid, high-contrast landscape of the late 1970s, this memoir observes the head-spinning summers of a ten-year-old child caught between two fiercely opposing worlds.

Every July, a mother packed her daughters into a clementine-colored Volkswagen squareback to visit a Yarmouthport, Cape Cod antique home governed by a Spanish Scottish Granny who strictly maintained the elegant, rule-bound rituals of the Edwardian era. With their father left in Boston to work, Granny often worried that her daughter and son in law were hippies and complained that her daughter was “...raising them like savages!” But when August arrived, the whole family headed north into the raw, off-the-grid wilderness of tiny Northfield, in Washington County, Maine. This meant trading formal afternoon tea, starch, and etiquette lessons for a remote survivalist-inspired camp with no running water, electricity, or phones. Dinner was what you caught in the lake that day, along with a few staples brought in from the trek to town once per week.

The narrative explores Elspeth’s annual cultural whiplash through the map of a typical day, mapping the profound ways a child learns to shape-shift between the parlor and the pines to discover a resilient identity of their own. Etiquette lessons learned along the way are shared at the end of each short chapter.

EXCERPT:

Yarmouthport, Massachusetts: Ultimately, all of the lessons learned in the summer were about helping me and Abby to find our way in the world. For Granny, finding her way involved a long, winding thread that was pulled through dusty Aguilas, Spain, across the frantic grid of New York City, and neatly knotted at rest in the quiet corner of Yarmouthport. But it was a sharp, six-month punctuation mark at a Liverpool “finishing school” that turned out to dictate some important elements of my childhood. Granny had navigated the Atlantic, but it was the social currents she feared I might struggle in. Her remedy was a relentless enforced curriculum of grace. For five years, Tuesdays arrived as a knot anchoring itself deep in the pit of my stomach. The physical transition into the Episcopal Church is emblazoned in my memory. Passing through the main sanctuary was creepy, illuminated only by stained-glass windows that filtered the afternoon into a solemn, underwater, pale green light. We were ushered into the parish hall, a fiercely bright space that was as cheerful as the church’s famous daffodil garden in the light of spring.

But inside that bright room lay a minefield of manners. There, we were drilled in the use of silverware, knives and forks galore. We were asked to memorize the bizarre, and sometimes contradictory rules of the table. We learned that one is shockingly allowed to use bare fingers to hoist a stalk of asparagus, yet a misplaced soup spoon is unforgivable. It was a weekly, torturous performance, staged with me wearing the starchy homemade dresses sewn by Granny, and underscored by the perpetual, exhausting reminder to maintain good posture. Slouching was an admission of defeat; rigidity was a prerequisite for survival. The final examination to graduate from the program involved being cast into a formal party room to navigate a sea of unknown adults. My throat tight with panic, I had to find the thread of conversation with at least three people. To a kid whose internal world was spun from soft green moss and flower fairy stories, the terror of those afternoons was suffocating as I had to learn to survive the parlor.

Decades remove me from that room, yet the feelings from that day remain mapped in my bones. I look back and recognize the girl shivering under the parish lights, but I must also acknowledge the woman she became. The lessons, difficult as they were, stuck. That suffocating, hard-won armor of poise serves me now in ways the child could never have anticipated. When I must work a crowded room in academia or sit at a glittering dinner party on the shores of the Bosphorus Strait surrounded by intimidatingly beautiful Turkish women, my spine remembers its training. The dread is gone, replaced by the quiet utility of the mask. Perhaps we are all shape-shifters in the end; perhaps we simply grow into the armor we were forced to wear and use. 

Etiquette Lessons Learned:

The Etiquette of Complex Silverware: One must be precisely drilled in the proper use of extensive table settings, including knives and forks galore.

The Rules of the Dining Table: One must memorize highly specific dining protocols, such as knowing it is permissible to lift a stalk of asparagus with bare fingers, whereas misplacing a soup spoon is entirely unforgivable.

The Requirement of Posture: Slouching is viewed as an absolute admission of defeat; maintaining rigid, upright posture is an essential prerequisite for formal presentation.

The Art of Parlor Conversation: When cast into a formal gathering of strangers, a properly trained individual must conquer social anxiety to initiate and maintain a thread of conversation with unknown adults.

Northfield, Maine: Beneath my boots, the brittle snap of twigs and the muffled, damp give of red pine needles. I am walking backward into my own life, eyes bound by a handkerchief, my palm round against the heavy, black metal casing of a compass. It is two o’clock on a cloudless afternoon by the lake, the sun is a bloom of heat against my skin. Beside me, my little sister Abby trudges along. Ahead of us is my father, his voice a disembodied string of coordinates: “Step left. Okay, keep going straight.” This is today’s lesson in survival—a clinical curriculum in managing emotion while navigating the unknown. Did I have a choice? Or was I simply drafted into this wilderness, a child-guide tasked with escorting another child home?

Then, the sudden freeze. “Halt!” he says, the word sharp, delivered in the German he carried home from his days with the soldiers in Ludwigsburg in the 1950s. “The next thing you are going to do is count to 120,” he commands. “That’s two minutes. Then you can take off your blindfold, get your bearings, and bring Abby back to camp. I’m heading back ahead of you.” My heart seizes, a small bird trapped in a cage of ribs. Crunch, crunch, crunch. The rhythmic decay of his footsteps fading into the distance until the woods swallow the sound entirely. He is gone. I do not count to 120. I pull off the blinder. The world rushes back in, sharp and blindingly green. I look at Abby. She is standing there, a familiar finger hooked in her mouth—so habitual that a tiny bump has formed on the skin. She isn't crying; she is just waiting for me to be the adult.

I wipe the sweat from my compass, clutching it like a talisman. I know camp lies northwest, but the dizzying geometry of my father’s off-trail twists has unspooled my internal map. The strategy is simple: find north, walk till I hit water. If it’s Bog Stream or the lake, I will recognize the shoreline. I know every inch of that coast. Yet, walking off-trail without the blindfold feels heavier. Ten minutes in, Abby begins to whimper. The anxiety is a physical weight, a sharp ache in my stomach. What if dark falls? Shelter first. Then water. Then fire. But a sudden realization paralyzes me: I have no matches. No magnifying glass to make fire with. I am completely unequipped. Why did he think it was okay to leave us? Did he want us to get lost?

For decades, this memory plagued me. We made it back, of course, but the ghost of that terror lingered. I remember stepping onto the gravel driveway, practically fainting from the emotional exhaustion, curling up tightly in my cabin bunk, staring at the raw wooden walls until sleep took me. Yet, the irony of trauma is that it leaves behind gifts we never asked for. Today, my husband brags that I can navigate Istanbul’s Grand Bazaar better than he can, or instinctively point out east and west on the confusing, hook-shaped tip of Cape Cod. The training worked.

For forty years, I sat with the heavy, calcified knowing that my father had abandoned me in those woods. And then, near the very end of his life, he looked at me and said, entirely out of the blue: “You know, I didn’t leave you in the woods. I just hid behind a tree and watched you the whole time.” The map rewrites itself. The abandonment dissolves into an act of silent, invisible oversight. He was always there, hidden in the negative space of the forest, watching his daughters find their way home.

Etiquette Lessons Learned:

The Etiquette of Blind Trust and Emotional Control: Survival in the wilderness dictates a strict curriculum of managing one's internal emotions and panic while blindly navigating the unknown under guidance from externally accessed sources as well as practiced intuition.

The Rule of Immediate Compliance: One must obey directional commands instantly and implicitly, freezing mid-stride the very moment a sharp, authoritative "Halt!" is delivered.