The picture here is the initiation ceremony of twin Apache girls in Tucson. The sunrise ceremony takes four days, and the girls spent months preparing for it. They spend the time dancing, praying, and being doused in sacred pollen. The ritual, according to the newspaper article on the girls, is intended to give them the qualities of White Painted Woman, the first woman of Apache legend. The woman between the twins is their mother.

I really wish we had coming-of-age ceremonies like this in my world. In Catholic families, there’s Confirmation. If you’re Jewish, it’s your B’nai Mitzvah. Hispanic girls have quinceañeras. Japan, Korea, and several other Native American tribes have formal celebrations, too. But for boring ol’ WASPs, there’s not really anything to be had.

The thing this picture makes me think of, though, is the Bluemont Ale. Almost every year our Morris team goes up to Bluemont, Virginia, near where I was born, for the best ale of the year. We dance some stands around nearby towns and orchards, then head to a campground on a mountain for the night. There is much singing, joking, and reuniting of friends who only see each other a few times a year. We watch the sun set over the river, watch the lights come on one by one in the valley. After dinner and some more singing, there’s a contra dance with more musicians than you can count.

And when I see these people, even in such a different setting and situation, I see the same thing. Here are people brought together by a common characteristic that makes them different from the rest of the world: in one case it’s ethnicity, in the other it’s a penchant for the freaky thing called Morris dancing. It’s like we’re saying the same thing in two different languages. Looking at these twin girls, I see myself dancing an Irish square with Marney Morrison or walking arm-in-arm with Laura Parsons. The girls’ mother seems very similar to these women: practical above all else, beautiful in the same way that oak trees are. In the dancers and musicians, I see Jim Morrison and Peter Kleeman, the high priests of the Morris world. The Arizona mountains seem much like my own beloved Blue Ridge. In the little girls behind the twins, I see the children of dancers too young to contra, watching sleepily from the side of their mothers’ arms.

I’m glad I’ve stumbled upon this photo. I started the entry thinking I had no formal coming of age ceremony, and I still don’t. But in ways, my own informal ones get the job done just as well. When Bill Davis asked me which colleges I was looking at during a reel, he was giving me a gift more precious than symbols or rituals. When Marney took me out onto the wooden floor, she was leading me into the sacred dance. My mother’s Morris bells, dented and tarnished from her use and mine, are just as good as any holy pollen. Someday, I will put my arm around my daughter’s waist and lead her onto that floor.