Cub Scouts

When I was little Mama signed me up for Girl Scout, Brownies really . There was a little building in the very middle of the village where we met. I was allowed to walk to the meetings with two older girls, Ellen and Kate. The girls in my grade who walked were Betty, Steffie and me. I remember thinking it was so grown up to walk past the bus and right off the school grounds without even telling a teacher. Most of the kids thought nothing of it but it was new to me and I loved it. Of course Ellen and Kate were totally bored with the rest of us and walked a few feet ahead at all times. They were only escorting us out of some kind of Girl Scout duty, like there was a badge they could earn for babysitting. Their mamas were the scout leaders. They were very nice to us but I didn’t enjoy girl scouts as much as I had Cub Scouts. Our neighbor Mrs Conway was a den mother. They lived across the street and on Tuesday afternoons car loads of boys converged on her carport. She always had the meetings out there…winter , spring, summer, fall…I figured she didn’t want those smelly boys in her house, I didn’t blame her a bit. If I had been in her place I would have made the boys who LIVED there sleep outside, they were the smelliest of all. Mrs. Conway always looked pretty and wore pearls like June Cleaver. I didn’t care for her older boy at all. He tried to kill me once, and if my cousin James, who was bigger and meaner hadn’t stepped in he might have finished the job, he pulled a pocket knife and told me if I squealed on him for saying a real nasty cuss word and using the word Bible in the same sentence he would cut my sissy tongue clean outta my head. He had embarrassed me in front of a bunch of people once too and I had no mind to forgive him for either offense. I just stayed out of his way. But, cub scouts looked like so much fun. They did the best crafts in the whole world. Mrs. Conway would see me hiding in the camellia bush watching from my yard. She would hold up the crafts for me to see, if I seemed interested she would invite me over after. The best one was the seed rooster. It was a piece of plywood with the outline of a rooster drawn on it. She had a bunch of little Dixie cups with seeds in them for me to glue on the board to make the rooster. There were beans and corn like I helped my daddy plant in the spring and there were other seeds I had never seen before. Daddy could identify all of them but I just thought they were really pretty and worked beautifully for a rooster’s tail especially when they were varnished to a golden shine. The crafts were the only part of Cub Scouts they let me participate in, that was fine with me. Mrs. Conway always saved the stuff so when the cloud of smelly boys cleared I could do the craft too….only she let me in her dining room to do it.