Column: Sara Aeikens, Creative Connections

My Scouting memories were rekindled during the 2012 Girl Scouts 100th anniversary celebration. After reading an Albert Lea Tribune newspaper article, I took the opportunity to network with some local Scouts in the surrounding rural areas and located alumnae Sue Grunzke from Alden, who changed her regular daily plans and drove us both to the Mall of America for a Minnesota Girl Scouts alumni event attended by several hundred former Scouts women.

Next to the Peeps store with a gigantic bright yellow Peep wearing a traditional Girl Scout green badge sash, we were guided to the Great Hall log cabin that provided space for us to share Scouting stories with many strangers who like me could identify Scouting backgrounds with similar values of service to others that extended globally.

After hearing the keynote speaker tell her story how Girl Scouts may have influenced her to found the Caring Bridge website, I began to muse about how my life’s unique experiences may have unfolded due to my Scouting upbringing.

As a young Brownie in my beanie cap, I learned the importance of teamwork, creativity, flexibility, communications and celebrations during troop activities both at regular meetings and Scouts camps.

Sue and I shared common activities from our individual childhood troops, and she noted that “it was because of those girls that I feel more comfortable now with groups of people.” Sue started as a co-leader and soon became the leader for a span of nine years.

“I just enjoyed it,” she said. “The girls taught me to be OK with being a little girl again.”

More than six decades ago as a child, I already knew the excitement of learning. My high school graduate mother learned many of her skills from her farm background and loved to garden for both food and beauty. My father with his Ph.D. in biology taught to all ages all the time the scientific terms and names of birds, flowers and trees of the vast plains of North Dakota we’d seen on our family travels throughout the state. Scouting became the main vehicle for putting this information to use.

Our family attitude of including any other interested learners was reminiscent of the song Girl Scouts Together we learned at our summer gatherings both in our hometown in Minot, N.D. and the camps surrounding Lake Metigoshe. Our father did his part by giving informational trail tours, pointing out poison ivy plants, food possibilities in bush berries and the burning properties in a variety of sticks and wood we collected for our campfires.

Mother helped organize the local summer day camps and made sure the groups had proper supplies and gear for learning survival techniques, even including our outdoor overnights in a snowdrift, each snuggled in our sleeping bags with a fire-warmed brick under our feet. She also helped coordinate trips or camp activities.

Variations of campfire pocket stew became a menu staple for my own family years later.

After camp meals we sang songs from around the world and learned a bit about other cultures. An exchange Girl Guide leader from Great Britain taught me to swim.

Other skills included crafting furniture, wash stands and picture frames by lashing sticks together and photographing our creations with my trusty Brownie box camera. Many years later I turned my photos into note cards as a business venture. Observation skills picked up in Scouting still serve me today, hearing geese on the pond and frogs in the reeds, or spying a turtle laying eggs along our community’s bike trail.

I suspect traveling with the whole family to marsh areas to see rare whooping cranes, or pick chokecherries or June berries in surrounding coulees gave impetus for earning specific badges. Time spent at camps straddling the U.S.-Canada border encouraged later travels abroad. My appetite whetted by childhood Scouting adventures, I joined the Peace Corp, spending two years in Venezuela in rural area service. As in my Girl Scout experiences with environmental issues, the importance of caring for and preserving our planet and its inhabitants came to the forefront.

For me writing is a way of carrying the legacy that goes beyond tangible attachments, to passing ideas forward, as through Scouting, and sharing our time and talents for the good of the world with God’s support.

 

Sara Aeikens is an Albert Lea resident.