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By Marie Huston I shake my head in amazement every January when parents wander my workplace taking orders for Girl Scout Cookies. When was the last time a Brownie knocked on your door with a case of Thin Mints to sell? They don't have to do it nowadays. Their parents sell 'em for them. They want me to order months in advance because they sell out so quickly and they want me to pay $2.00 for a box of Thin Mints. I am appalled! Now, I'm an easy target for any small child who knocks on my door selling something, but I refuse to pay $2.00 -- in advance -- at work -- to somebody's mother -- for Thin Mints. This is a direct result of the trauma I suffered in my childhood and I blame Gail Nelson every time those cookies go on sale. I guess the Twins and I are about the only ones who care about all this, but then, we're the ones that had to put up with Gail Nelson and her stupid mother. Grownups could carry on all they wanted to over dumb junk, but children were supposed to play nice. Mrs. Wheeler and Miss Simpson down at the church had a feud going for years over a pound cake and they were old ladies, but Mama said I had to be nice to Gail Nelson even if she was a prissy brat. It was a great trial and tribulation. She just showed up at the beginning of second grade. Nobody knew where she came from and nobody much cared. She hadn't gone to kindergarten or first grade with us and she didn't go to our church and she didn't ride our bus and she didn't live on our road. The Twins and I would have been perfectly willing to leave her alone and ignore her all year, but she didn't seem to want to be ignored. If she'd've wanted us to leave her alone, she wouldn't have started telling everybody that her pony tail was longer than the Twins' pony tails. The Twins had lived across the street from me and been my best friends since I was four years old. So when Gail Nelson dared to say that her pony tail was longer than theirs, I took up for the Twins. After all, I'd known them half my life and I didn't know her at all. Now, that was a stupid fight and the Twins and I knew it was a stupid fight. All you had to do was look and you could see she was wrong. Her pony tail was just a little knob at the top of her head, while the Twins' flowed down past their shoulders. Naturally, I pointed that out to her but she refused to give in. And for some reason, she wanted to keep that pot boiling because she wouldn't stop stirring it up. The Twins and I finally gave up arguing about it. If she was so stupid that she couldn't look in the mirror and see that she was wrong, she was too stupid for us to bother with. So she'd swish her pony tale in our direction and we'd ignore her. We knew we were right and we'd exchange smug glances while she went on making a fool out of herself. We were young and we might have gotten over the pony tail business eventually if she hadn't made a serious mistake. She fell in love with Douglas Macon. Now, everybody knew that I had staked Douglas Macon out during Bible School and he had been mine ever since kindergarten. Everybody knew that. Well, everybody but Douglas Macon. So when she had the downright nerve to start liking Douglas Macon, the Twins and I declared war. To top it off, she made the one fatal error that no true Southern Belle would ever make. She went right up and told Douglas Macon to his face that she had a crush on him. Well, that did it! There was no way we were ever going to like her -- not even if she brought us chocolate every day for the rest of our lives. Of course, all she accomplished was that Douglas Macon gave up talking to girls for the rest of the year. We couldn't believe she was so dumb that she didn't know you never tell boys you like them, but she wasn't from around here. So the Twins and I didn't like Gail Nelson, but we could have dealt with her if it hadn't been for the Brownies. She didn't ride our bus and she didn't live on our road and she didn't go to our church. We could have forgotten about her most of the time, but somebody started talking about forming a Brownie troop. The Twins and I decided we wanted that brown dress and little beanie cap. Margaret Walsh's mother was going to be the leader and we all knew she was lots of fun. There was a big meeting after school one day and all our friends signed up. It turned out so many girls wanted to be a Brownie that they had enough for two troops. When they announced how they had divided the troops up, the Twins and I gagged! Somebody had decided that we weren't going to be in Mrs. Walsh's troop. We were going to be in the other troop and the leader was going to be Gail Nelson's mother! So much for the Brownies. We wanted out! There was no way we were gonna be caught dead in that prissy Gail Nelson's mother's troop. But our own mothers showed us the stone wall and decided to give us a lesson in commitment. They had already paid our dues and bought the brown dress and little beanie cap and we were stuck. Nothing could compare to our mortification. We watched Margaret Walsh's troop go off to Atlanta to sit in the audience on Miss Boo's cartoon show while we had a stupid old Easter Egg Hunt at the park. We had been right. Margaret Walsh's mother was fun and her troop did exciting things and we were stuck in the Dud Troop. Mrs. Nelson ordered every Brownie a case of cookies to sell. There were just three kinds -- the Thin Mints, the butter cookies and the sandwich type, which nobody with any sense would buy when they could get the Thin Mints. And we had to sell them. It would have been fine if she'd given the Twins and me a case to share cause we could get rid of one case. But she made us each take our own case of cookies to sell. Didn't she know we lived in the same neighborhood? It was a small neighborhood. We could pretty much count on our folks buying a box and we thought probably Mrs. Poss and Mrs. Fleming would, but where in the heck did she think we were going to find enough people to sell three cases of cookies to? There was only one thing we could possibly do -- cross the highway. Our road dead-ended across the railroad tracks into the highway at Mr. Moore's store. Behind his store was a large group of houses, but we didn't know those people. We weren't allowed to cross the highway except to go straight to Mr. Moore's store and right back when our mothers ran out of buttermilk or eggs. Sometimes the older boys would get brave on Halloween night and risk getting caught crossing the highway without permission, but that was reasonable because it meant lots more candy and it only cost them a couple of Snickers for us not to tell on them. Our mothers said we could cross the highway to sell the cookies if we promised to stick together. So off we trudged, dragging those heavy boxes in the hot sun, knocking on every door on every street in that humongous subdivision. Girl Scout Cookies were not very famous and nobody much wanted to pay a whole 50 cents for a box of cookies. Some people were rude to us. Some people wouldn't answer the door, even though we could see them inside when we peeked in the window. We wasted every afternoon after school, missing Miss Boo's cartoons, and two whole Saturdays trying to sell those cookies. The only thing that kept us going, putting one tired foot in front of the other, toting those boxes of melting Thin Mints, was our hatred of Gail Nelson and her mother. We'd still have a case of sandwich cookies to sell today if I hadn't decided to carry them to prayer meeting one Wednesday night and act pitiful. I was able to dump the last few boxes down at the church and then we got our reward. We were going to Girl Scout Day Camp! One Saturday morning, we piled off to camp with our peanut butter sandwiches packed in a brown paper bag. I was excited because I was going to camp to find my long-lost twin who'd been separated at birth and become Hayley Mills. I didn't know who invented this day camp but all the adults thought it was wonderful because we were going to get to visit Nature. We were told there were crafts in the morning and an afternoon hike in the woods where we'd get to cross a swinging bridge. Cool. Tarzan had a great swinging bridge made out of vines and crossing a deep ravine, with a raging river underneath that swept him to a tremendous waterfall after he fought off all the alligators. So we made it through the crafty morning by dreaming of falling off that swinging bridge into the rolling river and battling the alligators. It was a good thing we had something to look forward to during the crafts or we'd'a been bored to death. They made us weave potholders. Give me a break. I'd made potholders back when I was in first grade. Anybody whose grandmother had already taught her to crochet doilies was way past the point of needing to learn how to weave a potholder. But I didn't say anything. I just went ahead and did mine and sat there till everybody finished and we ate our peanut butter sandwiches. For dessert, they served Girl Scout Cookies. The sandwich type. I figured they hadn't been able to sell those, either. Then it was time for our hike. They talked about how dangerous it could be to get lost in the woods and how we all needed to stay together. They talked about how dangerous it was if you ate poison berries. They talked about not touching any strange plants. They talked about rattlesnakes and water moccasins. Boy, this was gonna be fun! We were excited. These woods must be a really wonderful jungle -- they must be much better than our regular old pine woods at home, where we climbed trees and made tents in the kudzu. We only had black snakes in our woods and they were promising water moccasins! Then Mrs. Nelson did the strangest thing. She poured this powdery yellow stuff all over our socks. It was called sulfur and it stunk to high heaven, kinda like that Easter egg that got stuck under the bookcase when it rotted. She carefully explained to us that it would keep us from catching a rash if we got too close to poison oak. She gave me a funny look when I asked who would be stupid enough to get close to poison oak. She shut her mouth tight and talked through her teeth, saying "You don't know what poison oak looks like well enough to stay away from it." How could I not know what poison oak looked like when I played down in the woods every day of my life? Well, she looked mean then and I didn't talk back to her cause I wanted to go see this jungle they were raving about. I just settled for the thought that, boy, howdy, was my mama gonna yell at her good for putting that yellow junk all over my brand new white socks. So off we went on our safari and I began wishing my little beanie cap looked more like Rama of the Jungle's helmet. We were supposed to hold hands and use the buddy system so we wouldn't get lost. I didn't say that was just for swimming because Mrs. Nelson was looking like she had a headache after I asked how were we supposed to keep from hitting our head if we tripped over fallen trees while we were holding hands. Everybody knows that when you play in the woods, you need your hands free to pull back briars or catch yourself if you step in a hole or something. The path leading into the woods was wide enough for four people to walk side-by-side, but we were only allowed to walk in two's so we wouldn't get near the poison oak bushes. I couldn't see any poison oak since the path had been mowed back before we got there, so I assumed she meant when we got to the real jungle. We walked and we walked and I couldn't wait to get to the swinging bridge. We walked and we walked and I waited for the jungle to get there. We walked and we walked and the path stayed wide and the path stayed mowed. We walked and we walked and there was nothing in sight but regular old pine trees. Every now and then, we might pass a part of the woods that had potential for a good time, but Mrs. Nelson never went to check it out. We walked in a line and we stayed on that wide path. I spotted one really great climbing tree, but Mrs. Nelson must not've heard me because she kept on walking down that path. We walked and we walked until we came to a dry gully. There was a sturdy new wood bridge with wire handrails across the gully. I couldn't understand why anybody had bothered to put a bridge across such a small gully but then I hadn't understood about the yellow powder, either, so I just followed along at the end of the line. The whole troop packed across that bridge and when we got to the other side, Mrs. Nelson turned around and said, "Wasn't that swinging bridge fun?" That was the swinging bridge? Who was she fooling? The Twins and I stopped in our tracks and looked at each other. The troop kept on following Mrs. Nelson down the wide path. We went back to test it out. The three of us piled onto the solid rungs, grabbed ahold of the wire handrails and started swinging for all we were worth. It wouldn't budge. There was no vine. There were no frayed edges to the bridge where it might break at any moment. Heck, there wasn't even any water in the gully, much less an alligator or a waterfall. What a dumb bridge. We had made potholders for this? Naturally, Gail Nelson had been the one to tell on us. We were down in the gully trying to catch a lizard when Mrs. Nelson came back for us and she was not in a good mood. You could tell right off. By that time, we were over it. We were over the hike and we were over the potholders and we were over the cookies. We were over the Brownies. And we were definitely over Gail Nelson and her stupid mother. Nobody was ever gonna be able to make it up to us for that Swinging Bridge Lie. So I decided that Gail Nelson's pony tail needed a decoration. I don't think Brownie Scout leaders are supposed to yell at their Brownies just for getting a case of the giggles. But Mrs. Nelson yelled at the entire Brownie troop that day cause we were all giggling. We were all giggling so hard, Laura Morgan wet her pants. Well, we were all giggling except for Gail Nelson. She was too busy trying to get that lizard out of her pony tail. We soon made it back to the Day Camp on that wide path. We never did see the jungle and we decided it was a lie just like the swinging bridge. We never saw a snake of any kind, much less the promised water moccasin, and it was a waste of clean white socks cause any poison oak that might've been within two miles of that wide path had been cut down. It was Mama's turn to pick us up and Mrs. Nelson made a point of talking to her before we got in the car to go home. We couldn't hear what they were saying but Mama looked real serious and Mrs. Nelson was doing all the talking. Mama was a teacher and she knew how to be serious. From where we stood, the Twins and I thought we might be in a little trouble and have to be separated again. But once we got out of sight, Mama just asked us how we'd liked camp. So we leaned over the front seat, all talking at once and, boy, howdy, we told her it all. We were outraged. We told her everything. We told the whole story about the stupid camp. We told about them teaching us to make pot-holders like there was anybody our age that didn't already know how to make pot-holders. We told her about the Jungle Lie and we told her about the Swinging Bridge Lie. We showed her our brand new socks and made her smell that yellow stinky stuff. We told her, could she believe anybody didn't know what poison oak looked like. And from our point of view, we told her the biggest shame of the whole day was wasting a perfectly good lizard on Gail Nelson's pony tail even if it did make everybody laugh. Well, we didn't get punished and we didn't have to be separated for a few days. I think Mama understood. The only thing she said was that we had to understand that some girls didn't have our advantages in life. They grew up in the city and to them, the day camp was probably a treat. That's the first time I ever felt sorry for city slickers. It didn't last long cause the only city slickers that ever came to visit us were spoiled brats and we would take them down in our woods and get them lost -- but that's another story. As we drove away from that day camp, I felt sorry for all those poor city girls who didn't know what poison oak looked like and had never climbed a tree. We didn't join the Brownies the next year and Gail Nelson got transferred and left town. I visit Savannah occasionally and there's a nice building in the center of the historic section that has a sign saying, "Birthplace of Juliet Low, Founder of the Girl Scouts of America." The first time I saw that building, I knew why that day camp had been so dumb. Juliet Low was a city slicker! Her house is right smack dab in the middle of town. You can pay money and go inside to tour her home, but I've never bothered. It's on my list of things to do when I run out of anything else in the whole wide world to do. But if you're a Brownie Scout and you've got Thin Mints to sell, put on your brown dress and little beanie cap and come to my door. I'll pay the $2.00 instead of fifty cents, but I won't order in advance and I won't buy from your mother at work. If you want to blame somebody for that, find Gail Nelson and tell her it's all her fault.
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