Cool things in the works for the next couple of updates: an interview with my Grandma Jean, who was a Girl Scout leader half a century ago; reflections on what I’ve learned so far in my work on the Across Generations badge; a flashback to a Wider Opportunity trip in the 70’s; and hopefully a chat with a fellow Girl Scout alumna who says scouting was one of the best parts of her growing-up.   Stay tuned!

I know very little about my Great-Great-Aunt May.  I know that she was born in North Dakota around 1886.  I know that she was married to Chart Pitt, who wrote wilderness and adventure stories, in 1909.  And I know that she, too, wrote, because eight aged pages of poetry tell me so.

April is National Poetry Month, and since I’m presently working on a badge that seeks to teach girls more about the generations before them it seems like the perfect time to share some of my writing heritage.

May Garden

My garden’s full of lovely things,
A gypsy wind, a bird that sings,
The butterflies, the humming bees,
A glimpse of far-off summer seas.

The scent of flowers that nod and sway,
And up above, and far away
Beyond the shade of pine and yew
The vaulted dome of Heaven’s blue.

- May McLeod Pitt

The Answer

I sought for peace and found it
In a lowly garden spot;
Where bloom the tall white lilies
And the Blue Forget-me-not.

I sought for hope, and found it,
In the tulips’ crimson flare,
And the golden cheer of jonquils
That blossom everywhere.

I sought for faith and found it
When the winter clouds hung low;
For I knew my garden’s glory
Lay safe beneath the snow.

- May McLeod Pitt

The Wanderer’s Wife

I had a red rose blooming,
‘Neath the dreary Arctic sky —
The cry of “gold” rang through the night,
And I left it there to die.

I planted a little garden,
On the rim of the desert gray,
But when it flowered and fruited
We were a thousand miles away.

Strange sights I’ve seen in alien lands,
And islands of the sea,
When I longed for a pansy bed,
And the neighbors in to tea.

Oft times my feet grow weary,
The trails are rough and steep,
But lies a valley beyond the hill
He must see before we sleep.

Now here in my seaside cottage,
I rose to meet the dawn,
And drop hot tears on the lilac buds,
Tomorrow “we”ll ramble on.”

- May McLeod Pitt

This past Monday my mom had her second cataract surgery, which required a trip to Seattle and someone to drive her home.  Aunt Peggy was kind enough to volunteer, and I tagged along for moral support.  The surgery was relatively quick, and by late morning the four of us (Radar too) were tucked back into Peggy’s Little Red Sportscar ™, boarding the ferry back to Bainbridge Island.  Since I had my tape recorder with me, it seemed the perfect time to interview my mom and aunt about their memories of Scouting. 

“It seems to me,” Peggy said, “the Brownie uniform was one piece, was all brown, short sleeve, like a shirtwaist dress, and then we wore that gold sash.  And we had a little brown tam that we wore on our head.   And I don’t remember much about it, except it was fun.  And we just had a good time.   We had it at Walt Woodward’s house where he was building the boat in the living room.” 

“I went to the other end of the Island,” Mom said.  “I think it was Rolling Bay, to Cheryl Jones’ house.  And I was so impressed because her mother I think was the first woman captain, you know, that could captain a boat in this state.”

“What kinds of things did you do?” I asked.

“I can’t remember what we did,” Peggy said.  “Not as Brownies.  And even as a Girl Scout, I know we worked on badges, but I don’t have any specific memories of that.  I can remember going off to Girl Scout camp when I was in 8th grade, and that was an absolute blast.”

It’s been over half a century since either woman went to camp, but even so the names of three Washington Girl Scout campgrounds – River Ranch, Lyle McLeod, and Robinswold – came easily to the two sisters’ minds.  So, too, did the memories. 

“Swimming and canoing,” Mom said.  “That was my favorite, to go to the waterfront.  And I liked meals because you got to sing after.  And when I went to River Ranch, the kids washed the dishes.”

“BE PREPARED.”

I guess that’s a Scouting lesson my procrastinator’s heart has yet to fully embrace, as my still-empty suitcase will attest.  This evening I’ll be boarding a plane to Seattle, heading back to Bainbridge Island, where my mom grew up.  My grandmother’s had a rough few months, medically speaking, so I’m hoping to lend a hand where I can, give my mom and my aunts a bit of a break, and give Grandma a fresh face to talk to.

While I’m there, I’m going to take the opportunity to collect a little history.  One of the tips in the Junior Girl Scout Badge Book says:

Girl Scouts are often very active.  You might belong to a sports team, take art classes, take music lessons, and so on.  The activities that you do outside of Girl Scouting can be used to earn badges.  If you volunteer to take care of younger children during a religious services, for example, you could use it to fulfill a requirement for the “My Community” badge.  If you write a terrific story in school, you could use it for the “Write All About It” badge.  The scales you learn during your piano lesson could help you earn the “Making Music” badge.

For years I’ve been thinking about somehow collecting some of my family’s history, especially my grandmother’s stories.  The woman loves to talk, and every visit with her seems to turn up some new and interesting story.  As time wears on, there is an unspoken but nonetheless growing awareness among my family that someday Grandma will leave us, and those stories will be gone.  With the timing of my visit, and my new determination to take action on some of the cool things rolling around in my head, it seems like the perfect opportunity to dust off the tape recorder.

So!  With that in mind, I turned to the Badgebook.  My visit is going to last for a couple of weeks, during which I’ll be spending time with family, and getting to meet up with a fellow Girl Scout alumna.  I felt fairly confident that some of my already-planned activities would also help me to check off a few badge requirements.

Each badge in the current Junior Girl Scout Badgebook lists ten activities related to the badge’s topic.  Girls must complete six of these to complete the badge.  This is a change from the badge book that was in use when I was a Junior.  In that edition, the number of activities suggested varied, as did the number required to earn the badge.   A few other things have changed, too – the Dabbler badges, which offered an overall exploration of each of five different “Worlds,” no longer exist, and an Adventure Sports badge encourages girls to try out kayaking, windsurfing, and rock climbing.

When I first started to put this project together, I planned to use the same Junior handbook I mentioned in my first entry, along with the “Girl Scout Badges and Signs” from the same time period.

Then and Now

It seemed fitting, considering its part in the germination of this whole thing.  But I forgot take into account that it’s a twenty year old paperback that’s already seen a childhood of cover-to-cover reading.  After only a week and a half of planning it began to show further signs of wear.  Since I want to keep it to reminisce over when I’m old and grey, I’ve decided instead to use the present-day editions of the Junior handbook and Badgebook.  I figure this, too, is fitting – it’s a new adventure, and I’ll have the tool of the time to map out the way.

A look through the Badgebook led me to three badges that parts of my upcoming visit will fit:  Across Generations, On My Way, and Traveler.

The On My Way and Traveler badges both have to do with different aspects of travel.  Some of the activities, like planning a day trip, and visiting a Girl Scout sister in another city, are things I’d already meant to do as a part of my visit.  Others, like documenting a trip through postcards, diary entries, photographs, and videos, will be a fun and interesting extra.

The Across Generations badge focuses on learning from senior citizens, and this is the one I’m particularly looking forward to working on during my visit.  I’m something of an introvert, and while I love hearing people’s stories, I often find it difficult to talk to people.   I’m hoping that this badge, which suggests interviewing seniors about their lives, careers, special hobbies and skills, and Girl Scout history, will give me a little extra dash of courage to start a conversation.

Now I need to go pack my suitcase (I know, I know, be prepared!  Hey, it doesn’t say “be prepared on time.”) but before I go, I just want to mention:  I’m hearing the coolest things already as a result of this project – a couple of people have told me about how they grew up in the Girl Scouts, something I didn’t know about them.  My sister passed the link to this blog on to a friend of hers, who planned to print out my last entry to share with her troop.  One friend liked my idea so much that she’s started a Super Awesome Project of her own, vowing to finally read through a ginormous set of classics her mom collected for her over the years.  I discovered that the same friend spent summers at the same Girl Scout summercamp that my mom worked at decades before.  They’ve never met, but they share a major soft spot for Camp River Ranch and its memories.  It makes me grin, I can’t help it.  It’s so exciting to begin seeing these connections, and to hear other women’s memories of Girl Scouting.  I hope more come along – I’m loving this!

In Brownies, I was part of an active troop.  Tuesdays, if I remember correctly, were Brownie Day.  This was vitally important because the best part of the whole week was getting to wear my Brownie uniform to school.  I had almost the whole kit – the white shirt, patterned in pale brown trefoils and stripes, underneath the brown jumper.  The sash, and the little brown felt flag that carried my pin.  And best of all, my beanie with the little orange Brownie dancing on the front, which I felt certain made me look like the coolest 2nd grader on the planet.  All I was missing was the brown knee-socks with the little orange flag-thingies, for which I pined mightily.  Every Tuesday morning I dressed carefully in my uniform, and woe be unto my Mom if for some reason I didn’t get to wear it.  Wearing my uniform and going to the weekly troop meeting was important to me in the way that some things just are when you’re a kid – things you never were able to find words for, no matter how badly you wanted to make your exasperated parents understand.  Luckily for me, my mom got it.  She’d been a Girl Scout, too.

When I changed schools at the beginning of the third grade, one of the hardest things about the transition was that my new school didn’t have much in the way of Scout activity.  At first, as I recall, there was no troop at all.  Then when I was in fourth or fifth grade, one of my friend’s moms started a troop.  I was glad to have meetings again but it wasn’t quite the same.  Nobody in my new troop wore their uniforms to school.  The new troop leader worked on badges in a different way than my old one had, and I didn’t understand the structure.  I was older, and the other girls my age weren’t as interested in Scouting as they might have been a few years before.

I technically remained a member of Girl Scouts for a few more years, as I remember, but without the friendship of a troop I was never really active again.  It didn’t mean its value to me had changed at all, though.  Even into high school, and on visits home from college, my remedy for stress and confusion was often to pull one of my Girl Scout handbooks from the shelf and settle in to read for a while.  Their pages were filled with instructions and stories that told me that girls could be ready, could handle any problem, could get things done, darn it.  If books could be comfort food, then those Girl Scout handbooks were my homemade mac ‘n cheese.

Flash forward to my early-to-mid-twenties.  I was in a thrift store, shopping with my mom, and, as always seems to happen, I found myself in the book section.  Though it had been a long while since I’d actively sought out new acquisitions for my GS handbook collection (and, in fact, a long time since I’d even seen what I had, it having been boxed up and stored in the course of several moves), my eyes strayed naturally to the top shelf, where all the scouting books were.

“Oh, hey,” I murmured to myself, smiling as I reached for a familiar-looking green spine.  “That’s the same edition I used when I was-”  And that’s about where my eyes widened and my mouth dropped open.  For there, written in my mother’s tidy and unmistakable script in the top right corner of the cover, was my name.

“MOM!”

After a humorous and still-unresolved discussion about how the heck my Junior handbook had been given to the thrift store, the slightly worn out book went home with me.  That night, paging through it, I felt a certain kind of comfort and safety that I hadn’t felt in a long time.  It was like finding an old friend, a best friend.

The last ten years of my life have been full of the unexpected.  A childhood seizure disorder I’d never thought of as being much of a problem became a full fledged disability as I hit college, affecting virtually every facet of my life.  I dropped out of school, for a few years I had major difficulty reading anything, and I found myself stuttering and losing words and memories.

Slowly, slowly, I’ve been able to surmount most of what life put in front of me, but the experience has changed me profoundly.  I no longer feel confident and capable.  In new situations I hang back, waiting for someone else to jump in and save the day, because I’m pretty sure they know more about how to do it than I do.  I’ll do what’s asked of me, and gladly, but I can’t ever seem to see anymore what needs to be done.  I never take initiative – I don’t seem to remember how.

Which brings us to the Super Secret Project of Awesome I’ve been hinting at over the last two weeks.  I don’t know what made it pop to mind, but one night a couple of weeks ago I had a sudden, crazy bout of inspiration.  I miss Scouting.  I miss the sisterhood, I miss having a reason and a path to learn new things, and I miss earning markers of my achievements.  I’ve often half-joked, half-lamented to my sisters and my friends that one ought to be able to earn badges as a grown-up, too; that there ought to be Girl Scouts for Grown-Ups.  And as I was yet again thinking over all of this, a little speech bubble popped into my head.

“Why not?”

Well… hey, why not?  Why not pick up where I left off, in Junior Girl Scouts, and work my way through the handbook and the badge book?  As I dusted off my old Junior handbook once more and looked again through its pages, the idea grew on me.  It could be a lot of fun, and I could use a project.  Besides, I’ve spent much of the last ten years feeling lost and inept.  Girl Scouting aims to “build girls of courage, confidence, and character, who make the world a better place!”  Well, why not me, too?

Today is the birthday of Girl Scouting in the United States, the 98th anniversary of when Juliette Gordon Low, after years of searching for something useful to do with her life, gathered 18 girls to be the first American Girl Guides.  In scouting, Juliette found a sense of purpose – to help girls learn to be capable and self-reliant, to be ready to take on the world as well as to make it better.

I’ve been searching a while, too, and it feels appropriate to begin my endeavor on the same day she began hers.  Beginning next week, Wednesdays on this blog will be devoted to my Scouting updates, following my progress as I work my way through each of the badges.    Juliette’s legacy has so far reached over 50 million American girls.  I hope she won’t mind one lost 29-year-old coming along, too.

Tune in on Wednesday to find out what badge I’m aiming at first!

I love it.  It’s a part of all this that I tend to forget about, and when I get going again on a project it’s a happy and magical surprise.  In my bedroom is a gigantic bulletin board, upon which are pinned numerous  bits of paper, all sizes.  The notes on them are sometimes clear, sometimes cryptic, and the spacial organization of the thing is known only to me.   There are two novels in the works on this board, waiting to gather enough pieces that I can thread them together.  There are scenes, and character sketches, and names of fictional businesses.  It’s the sort of thing that, if my life were an episode of Law & Order, the detectives would look at and think I was a little crazy.  I love it.  If you ask me, it’s the most beautiful thing on my walls.  It’s my creative process, right there in front of me, right where I need it.  It’s fertilizer and flower, all in one.

Writer’s block can be frustrating.  If you’re going through it, put down the pen or the laptop and go make something.  Paint a rock, fold some origami, make a snowman.  Then make something else.  Then something else.  At some point, your creative pathways will be clear again, and you’ll be ready to write again.

I’ve gotta say: creativity is one of my favorite things about being human.  Seriously. 

Writing everyday is a way of keeping the engine running, and then something good may come out of it. (T. S. Eliot)

I’ve got friends who, when life is stressful, bury themselves in their writing.  The more the world crashes down around their ears, the more they write, turning out pages and pages in their escape.

I am so not one of those people.

When I get stressed out I shut down, and unlocking my creativity is a task somewhere on the level with raising a long-sunken ship.  It can be done, but it takes a lot of work and extra time, and often the result isn’t particularly pretty.  For me, writing when I’m overwhelmed with stress is exhausting and not very productive.

Which is all fine.  I am a firm believer that the writing process doesn’t take place just on the page – there’s a lot of brainwork to be done, and a lot of experiences that need to be had before things can really bubble forth.  If now and then it’s better for me to skip a day or two of writing, okay.  That’s fine, as long as I go back to it.

The hard part, though, is the actual getting back to it.  Even a break-with-a-good-reason seems to rust up the wheels in my brain.  It’s not just a matter of habit, nor a matter of momentum.  It’s like the creative part of my brain begins to fade back into dormancy the moment I take my hand away from the keyboard or pen.  Waking my creativity is a lot like waking me: there’s a lot of clumsy staggering involved, some whining, and usually a desperate hope that caffeine might help.

Still, there’s enormous comfort in the knowledge that once I get past that groggy wake-up period, I always find my way back to that place where the words come smoothly and there’s that joyful feeling that what I’m writing is vivid and real, or could be when the rough places are smoothed over.  I love that part.  It’s what keeps me writing.

This has been a stressful week, but the biggest stressors have passed.  Time, now, to get the wheels turning again.  I’ve got deadlines!

As it turned out, we needed every last bit of it.  The roads were good, but there was a heavy fog for virtually all of the journey, so thick in places that cars seemed to vanish if they moved a length in front of us, and guard rails turned invisible.  Driving slowly was a must, and that, too, was a good thing.  The night’s fireworks had roused and unsettled plenty of area moose.  We came within inches of hitting one shortly after we left the house, and saw ten more along the way.

It was a strange night, the kind of scene you see depicted in movies just before Something Big.  With the fog there was no guessing what might come in the next moment, and moose, other cars, and pedestrians left no question that there would be something, at some point.  My sister’s hands were frozen into frightened claws on the steering wheel, and every mile offered several options for an injurious if not deadly accident, but we couldn’t turn back – someone had to pick Jay up.

In the very few moments where my eyes and attention weren’t absolutely imperitive to Moosewatch ‘09, I thought about my writing.  I seem to be having this transformative period, where I’m suddenly willing to charge foolishly ahead to face all the writing challenges I’ve carefully avoided in order to get to the good stuff that I know is there somewhere.  For two years I’ve been avoiding writing something because it’s very personal and very uncomfortable for me to focus on.  TWO YEARS.  And it’s just words.  I might never even show it to anyone, and I’m okay with that, and I’ve still managed to put off writing it for two years.  It makes me that uncomfortable.

About a week ago, I somehow mustered the fortitude to sit my butt down in my chair, turn off the computer, and write it down.  I’m not exaggerating when I say that I spent the next hour and a half fighting off the urge to find something, anything, else to do.  A horrible wriggly tension wormed its way up and down my spine, my back tensed up, my stomach turned to a bile bowl-o-rama.  My face contorted into the expression of extreme displeasure usually reserved for blood, vomit, and dog doo, and it stayed that way the entire time my pen was in contact with paper.  As I wrote, the picture in my head became clearer and more details returned to me, making the tightness in my back crawl ever more fervently.  Every negative emotion I’d used to avoid the subject circled round to gnaw and claw at me, every secret fear crawling along my veins, looking for a crack to ooze into.

It sucked.  It sucked so much.  Right up to the last sentence, my fingers itched to put down the pen and push me away from the desk.  I had walked up to one of my secret dragons and said “Do your worst,” and it did, even more than I’d feared.

And you know what?  I lived.  As I finally wrote the closing to the remembered scene, I drew a deep breath that reached far into the claw marks, and I felt a sense of awed victory.  I had conquered that sucker, a big fat, ugly, smelly firebreathing thing that had held my writing hostage for two whole years.  I’d looked it in its smug and bloodshot eyes and faced it down, and when the dust settled I was left with a deep and thorough sureness:  I had slain my biggest and baddest monster.  Whatever else might come, I’d conquer it, too.  I was freed.  My writing was freed.

When my sister peeled her worry-frozen fingers from the wheel that New Year’s Eve, she leaned back against the headrest and blew a raspberry at the ceiling.  Under the orangey glow of airport parking lights, we did a hokey-pokey-esque dance of joy at just being alive and in one piece.  We’d made it.  Holy shit, we’d made it.

Seeing Heather and Jay together made all the stopped breathing and skipped heartbeats of the trip make sense.  She’d finished the drive.  Because she had to, and because there was the promise of something good at the end.

Conquering dragons isn’t easy.  There will be murky places along your journey, and wild beasts will come at you from places unseen.  It will be worse than you feared.  But sometimes you just have to do it.

And in the end you will be your own hero.  And it will be worth it.

A month ago I cried at the memorial service of an occasionally grouchy woman who was a major fixture in my life for most of my childhood.  She was 58.

My grandmother has been in and out of the hospital for the last few weeks.  From one day to another the picture changes.  She is 92.

Life is freaking short.  I will turn 30 in less than six months.  When did that happen?  In my mind I’m still 9 and a half, still running around with an apron on my head pretending to be one of the nuns from The Sound of Music, still laying in the moss and the dogwood and the sunshine, thinking about all the things I’m going to do when I grow up.

The new year is only a few days away, and people are making promises to themselves.  This year I’m not.  Instead, this year I’m making promises to you.  Here they are.

1. I will dedicate myself to my art, and to making something that someone, somewhere, will feel.
Quite some time ago I figured out that what I really wanted to do with my writing was to give people what books had given me as a kid – a way to escape.  I figured it out, maybe, but I haven’t done a lot about it.  I’ve been too scared.  See the following.

2. I will write as much crap as I need to, even if it’s mountains of it, even if it’s enough crap writing to bury cities and continents and planets, because that is what I have to do to get to the truth.
I hate writing badly.  I hate the idea that something I write will make people wrinkle their noses at their screens and secretly think “Huh.  That’s… well, not very good, really.”  I hate the idea that someday I might be a well known and pretty decent writer and someone will turn up some of my older, clumsier, stupider words.  But no one paints masterpieces first.  Nobody.

3. I will experiment boldly.
I hate taking risks.  It sends prickles under my skin and makes me want to run away.  I want stability, I want safety, and I want to know that things will be what and where I expect them to be.   That’s a lousy way to be creative.   As of now, creative exploration takes precedence over feelings of safety.  I will try new things.  And they might suck.  And it will be okay.

4. I will (mostly) quit thinking about the publishing industry.
There is absolutely no point, no productivity, no anything-good in my getting all wrapped up in agent blogs and query letter advice until I have something I feel is beautiful and worthwhile to put out into the world.  It’s a waste of time I could spend writing.

5.  I will be a freaking artist!
My talents are not now, nor have they ever been, practical.  I’ve spent a lot of time trying to figure out how to make them practical, or how to at least make them look practical.  Screw that.  I’m a writer, and a dreamer, and an imaginer, and the very fact that those things are utterly impractical and unnecessary is what makes them meaningful, and important, and worthwhile.  I hereby make the promise to commit myself foolishly to new experiences, to dreamy thoughts, and to messy words, in the pursuit of creating something true and beautiful.

Art, for me, is about internal truths given to the world.  That’s why I’m making my promises to you instead of to myself.  So that when I’m 30, or 58, or 92, or 115, and my time is up, I will have left my mark behind, and it will all have meant something.