Eager Beaver’s vacation

The Eager Beavers Club formed the summer my sisters, cousin and I took over the long-neglected, tiny four-roomed house next to my grandparent’s home. My uncle had used the empty living room to mix-up seed for his hay fields. The seeds looked like trash to me – until he asked what had happened to the heaps he had left in the house.
“We dumped ‘em out in the woods behind Grandma’s house.” He sighed and that was that.
We also swept down the cobwebs, cleaned the tiny kitchen, found and set-up a table and chairs and invited our mothers, aunt and grandmother to come to our house for a party. We prepared a meal, set the table and made up a cozy bed for our pre-school cousin inside an antique iron baby bed left in the house. The meal concluded with the official Eager Beavers Club asking the older women in our lives to share their special skills with us: Knitting, keeping an account book, doing hair, and basic first aid.
Grandma spent a day teaching us to knit. My sister and I eventually made pinwheel pillows. I also started a set of mittens using four needles – and gave up half way through the cuff.
The Eager Beavers faded with our entry into junior high homemaking classes.
Last week in Arizona, the Eager Beavers re-gathered from three states. We had enough ideas of what to do to in that one week to keep us busy all summer. My sisters wanted to make a quilt: Figure out the size, buy the material, design the appliqués, fuse and stitch them into place and sew the blocks and strips together. My cousin and I wanted to go to the Grand Canyon, the Painted Desert, an Indian ruin or two, some quaint little boutiques, tourist shops, thrift stores and finally garage sales when our money ran out.
Thunderous, sweeping storms welcomed us to my brother’s place in Phoenix followed by snow flurries and biting winds, which swept us into the shelter of my sister’s house in Chino Valley for a couple days of making quilt blocks.
In two and a half days of work (about 80 hours of combined labor) we finished most of the stitching of appliqués, laid out the quilt pattern and had a third of the strips cut and ready to sew between the blocks.
“Do you realize people pay hundreds of dollars for weekend quilting seminars and workshops where they do exactly the same thing that we are doing?” one of the Eager Beavers asked. Someone stuck out a hand and said, “Okay, pay up folks.”
Half way through the week, spring came to the desert, the air warmed and we chatted our way over Mingus Mountain remembering our days as the Eager Beavers and filling in our 30 years of busy-as-beavers mothers. We traveled down into the ghost mining town of Jerome and Tuzigoot Indian ruins one day. The next day we had a perfect, clear day at the Grand Canyon.
Seven hours and a picnic lunch later, the Eager Beavers agreed we had ridden, walked, hiked, photographed and seen more of the canyon than ever before.
“We began the day trying to figure out which of the three shuttle rides around the canyon we would take and ended up taking all three,” was my sister’s summary of our visit to the Grand Canyon.
A tour group could not have seen or done much more – and for sure not for any less.
Throughout the week, we discussed other projects and places we could experience together.
As I packed my suitcase to go, I said, “well you know, if you want to learn how to refinish furniture, I have a bunch of chairs in our attic … .”
Their responding chorus of approval ended our week with my little sister’s observation, “The Eager Beavers have returned.”
(Joan Hershberger is a reporter at the News-Times. She can be reached at joanh@everybody.org)