Hibbard girls club, Quzzle Quzzle, quack quack

As a child, my sisters, a girl cousin and I organized ourselves into a club with the motto, “Quzzle, quzzle, quack, quack.” After 35 years, who remembers the reason for that motto?
The important thing was that with the club, we declared ourselves not only sisters and cousins, but also best friends.
As cousins, we could play. As a club, we had to do something. The Quzzle Quackers developed a club project. We decided to buy a doll advertised on the back of a cereal box. It had comb-able hair and clothes for play, school and sleep. Between the four of us we could afford to buy one.
We had almost outgrown dolls, had plenty f other dolls, but none with an assortment of clothes like that. We hoarded our allowances, added up our pennies, nickels and dimes and finally had saved up enough.
We filled out the order blank, stuffed box tops in an envelope and stalled at those puzzling instructions: “No stamps, please.”
We looked at each other. How could we send away for something and not put a stamp n the envelope?
“You have to put a stamp on a mail.” We all knew that much. We decided that whether those people liked it or not, we would put a stamp or two on that envelope. We licked our stamp and sent away for our dream doll.
It finally came. We tried on all its clothes. Shared it between our two houses, but mostly it was simply our club feat of accomplishment.
The Quzzle Quackers other great accomplishment was the party we gave our mothers, aunt and grandmother. We invited our two toddler girl cousins to come along.
Long summer afternoons of play were spent in the abandoned, tiny, one-bedroom cottage on my grandparent’s property. We swept, cleaned and prepared that cottage thoroughly for our party. Probably worked harder at cleaning that house than we ever had at cleaning our bedrooms or our mom’s kitchen.
The cottage needed it. Our farming fathers had used the bare cottage floors to mix seed for spring planting. We swept, sacked and dumped a heap of hay seed that summer. The adults did not realize what we were doing until the entire place was clean. I do remember some adult asking what we had done with the heaps of seed left on the floor. They took their loss with farmer stoicism.
Plastic was tacked over the windows, a table and chairs scrounged up for the party, decorations made, invitations written, a discarded wrought iron bed cushioned and blanketed for the toddlers and the food cooked, all by members of the Quzzle Quack Club.
When everything was ready, we sat back and admired our preparations.
The family matriarchs came, sat in our scruffy building and ate at our childish table. The toddlers played with our club doll. Our party was a success.
All by ourselves, without any adults, we had raised money, cleaned a house and held our first party. Adulthood was not far off.


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