Angels watching over me

When I was a little kid, Mother was my sister Susan Rene's Girl Scout troop leader, and the group often met in the big living room of the house where we grew up. I was supposed to stay in my room/out of the way during troop meetings, but of course I frequently sneaked down the hall to stand in the doorway and listen to what was going on.

Mother loved to sing—she and Daddy used to sing away the miles as we traveled, and I remember looking out through the back window of the station wagon many nights to the melody of their Shine on Silvery Moon and other songs from their familiar repertoire—and singing was often a part of the Scout meetings. By the time I was big enough to be aware of what they were singing, the girls were singing melodic rounds of White Coral Bells, the tripping air of An English Country Garden, the solemn Peace of the River, and the descant of Angels Watching over Me.

I loved listening to the songs, whether as the Girl Scouts sang them in our living room or as my sisters harmonized as they went about housekeeping or as we gobbled up miles on family trips. I'm the tone-deaf one in the family who got kicked out of the school choir in the fifth grade, but I squawked along the best I could and thoroughly enjoyed the music in our home.

I started first grade the year our Girl Scout council bought a little chunk of land just outside of town and built a camp so those of us growing up here could adventure into the out of doors. A few years before she died, Mother told me that the real story behind the camp's name was that Daddy had picked it out, campaigned for it in his quiet way, and made it stick.

Daddy had picked our little town to establish his glass business a couple of years before I was born because he liked the friendliness of the community, which was symbiotic with the atmosphere of the college just down the road. At that time, the college was small, all male, and all military, and students greeted each other and visitors with a single word: Howdy. Daddy liked that message enough to think it fit as the name of the new Girl Scout facility, and from the early days when the site team was clearing out spaces for campsites, it became known as Camp Howdy.

Three decades later when my Darling Daughter was a Brownie scout, Camp Howdy had grown by a few acres and had modernized substantially, but when I returned there with her as a day camp unit leader, I found that feet that had run those trails for 10 years in my childhood could still find their way around camp without a map. Most of the camp sites had running water and picnic tables by then, and most had some sort of preparation area for cooking, but the main trails and camp sites were pretty much the same.

Best of all, the woods rang continually with music. In the years that I was away, singing had become at least as big a part of the day camp experience as anything else was, and the only real "competition" in camp was to see which unit sang the most on the trails, as observed by collection of trinkets from camp staff as campers moved through camp. The music had changed substantially over the years, but whenever I have found myself alone on the trails—which has been pretty often during almost two decades as the leader of the aide-in-training unit—I find myself going back to the old songs I remember from my own camping days.

Sunday afternoon was not quite one of those days. I volunteered more years ago than I can remember to serve on the site team that takes care of the camp, which mostly means that from time to time I volunteer to go out and head up a group of university students who are willing to help us clean up and care for the camp. My assignment Sunday was to take a crew of them down into the depths of the camp, where earlier volunteers had defined a new spot for a fire pit and had started trimming undergrowth to open up spaces for gravel-covered tent pads.

Our job was to drag out deadwood around the perimeter of the site, knock out and clean up the area where the old fire pit was, and set the landscape bricks for the new pit. I had everybody in the group stop on the way to the site to pick up a couple of bricks and one or another of several tools we would need. Three of the kids volunteered for the fire pit job, and I set the other four to pulling out deadwood. I clipped away enough yaupon to get the deadwood crew to work, then left them to it so the others could get the fire pit started.

I showed the pit builders how to use the tools they'd need to make the circle the right size and to level the bricks on the gentle slope of the site, then went back over to help with the deadwood. I had acquired a cool new pair of loppers a couple of weeks before, and I was eager to see if they did the job I wanted them to do. Besides, the girls on that crew were moving at a snail's pace, and we'd never finish the job if they didn't have more help.

So much scrabble was on the ground that I didn't need the clippers; I picked up armloads of wood and hauled them out to the trail where two of the girls were carrying them in small loads up to the parking area where next week's crew will mulch them or load them off to a burn pile. On one trip into the woods, I felt something pull at my pocket and made a mental note to be sure the car keys were safe in the bottom of it. I had driven my soldier son's car because mine was running on fumes and his needs to have the fluids stirred up from time to time, and losing his keys while he's stationed in Afghanistan might not be my best move. I keep an assortment of store cards and a little pill box on a small ring that snaps onto my key ring, and I stopped on the way back into the woods to be sure the hook was snapped firmly onto my belt loop.

When our 4-hour service time was over, my crew and I had hauled enough bricks to get the fire pit to its full complement of 60, knocked out the old fire pit and moved its old railroad ties across an old trail to slow erosion, and created a fairly prodigious stack of deadwood for mulching. We gathered up our tools and trudged back to the parking area where the site team leader had brownies, oranges, and soft drinks for the kids. I visited briefly with the rest of the team about what we had accomplished and what's next on the plans, then headed off to the car and home.

Except that the car keys were not so much in my pocket. The ring with the store cards and cold medicine was still hooked on my belt loop, but the keys were not there, not in my pocket, not with the sweatshirt I had peeled off and set aside, no place.

I called back to the team leader that I had lost the keys and had to go to the unit to look for them, and all three of them men agreed to hop in the ATV and go with me. When we got to the site, the guys piled out and asked where I thought they should look. I swept my arm in a large arc and said, "There." From where we stood, I had worked over a swath of land probably 30 feet wide and maybe 100 feet long; the keys could have been anywhere.

They all nodded along and seemed to agree in unison that they needed to check out the quality of work on the new fire pit. I stomped into the nearest area we had cleared of deadwood and tried to figure out where I would go from there. I had beat my way through underbrush and vines in an arc from about 15 away in one direction to maybe 40 feet in the other, and that kind of work—bending, stooping, ducking through the scrub—was the most likely place for the keys to jump from my pockets. I decided to start on the near side, ducked under a yaupon bush, and stopped: the oddly symmetrical shape a few inches from my feet couldn't have been anything but the remote control for the keys.

I couldn't help but grin as I bent down to pick them up and heard the echo of the songs in the living room from so many years ago: all night, all day, angels watching over me!