Awards and Badges

I Want Another Girl Scout Badge

I see someone running backwards trying to catch up with me. Oh it’s me. I have gotten way too far ahead of myself. A life in the day seems like a loop-de-loop race or one of those ancient threshold interlacements of a continuous line. Coffee in hand I email one of the county Supervisors; I want to help with traffic noise issues. We have 18-wheelers growling and screeching all day and night too fast on our rural 2 lane road.

Then I sauté chicken for Sunday’s dinner. Next I delete things and unsubscribe from dozens of email newsletters. This task remains unfinished because I always think I will read one more poem-a-day or column about how to undo the current mess, restore (or improve) our republic — and keep it, to boot.

Time to go fetch my compadre in small time activism. We do mid-day rounds to 5 local small businesses giving away laminated signs to mark employee-only spaces that ICE would need a warrant to enter; we also demonstrate (less successfully, usually) our set of public-facing signs that feature flowers or hearts and say things like “We support immigrant families.” The retailers know their customer base. But some are brave. Courage is contagious, they say.

Luckily today three of the store owners are first or second generation citizens (compared to my five or six or more) and one was so moved to hear us express our thoughts about community support that she teared-up a little and took our signs. Next stop the art shop — well, in a manner of speaking; my friend is an art teacher who loans me some cool tools for a project I’m doing and then I arrive home and cook and eat dinner and watch TV with my sweetheart and we don’t argue about how I tend to hover behind him and wipe the water off the sponge-painted water-based polyurethane-coated counter because I restrain myself from so doing, for a change.

Onward to watch an art how-to video about making your own rubbing plates with stencils and molding paste and then to view some pictures a photographer friend has kindly taken. I wanted to have some portraits while I’m still hale and hearty. I remember how I didn’t have many well-composed photos of my Mom between her retirement and when she moved to the memory care unit. 

I tick off boxes, managing to submit 5 poems to a journal before midnight and then, just as I close my computer, I remember the Daily Grind – a writing accountability group I singed up for – so I turn something in and now I want a Girl Scout badge because it’s after midnight and I am still planning to do my knee exercises, take a bath before bed, read a few Substacks while I soak, and get up Sunday to cook the rest of the celebratory dinner for my offspring and partner who have bought a house!! I’m lucky I have time to burn the candle at both ends because it’s a weekend.

Once upon a time I was a Girl Scout in a foreign land and the mother who volunteered to be the leader of our little troupe decided that the nearby forest was too wild for us. It was bad enough that prep for the camping trip involved mainly making something called a “sit-upon” woven of newspaper strips, covered in plastic, with waist ties. Meant to prevent our bottoms from getting wet as we sat upon the ground. I thought this was ridiculous. I’d been lucky to go camping fairly often with my family and we did not worry about the damp, but spent our time getting dirty and wet, cooking over a fire, hiking the trails, and being sensibly careful about truly-worrisome possibilities such as scorpions or adders. So when the forest was nixed and it was decided that the camping would take place in the grazing fields behind my house – the fields where I caught butterflies all day or “saved” the tadpoles from the anti-mosquito chemical they dumped into the pond, I gave up scouting and resumed solo nature exploration.

I had earned a reasonable number of badges, but not enough to fill my sash. I am realizing I want to make up for lost time. Life Badge. I would like to have an embroidered Life Badge. OK?

I know, I’ll have to sew it myself.