Friday afternoon in the Campus Center brought a bout of hysteria at Bard College. Three girls, around eight years old, stood with two parents behind a table. Objectively, this scene is nothing to be noted. However, context provided us with the glory of boxes and boxes of Girl Scout cookies.

The girls stood before a line of eager students and faculty members barely holding on to crumpled dollar bills and quarters awaiting their turns to select their favorites. The boxes flew from the table like a flock of migratory birds, unified in their lustful anticipation of those sultry cookies.

So, what is all the fuss? Why is it that every year, despite the rocketing prices of the packages (since I was a Girl Scout, the prices have doubled), we stand in long lines, drooling for our yearly ration of sweet treats?

To answer this, I turn to memories, as one often does when calculating the reasoning behind a certain reaction.

While not everyone participated in a club group like the Girl Scouts or Boy Scouts, there is a sort of comforting consistency in the yearly promise of Girl Scout cookies — to await the solicitous phone calls from aunts and uncles on your cousins' behalf to fill out that order form, to the waiting period that stretches much longer than you think is necessary, and to finally forgive both of these occurrences for the unequivocally delicious cookies. It is these fragments, that we seem to forget about in October or December, that are renewed as soon as that cookie hits our lips.

For me, this experience equals what I imagine Marcel Proust to be indicating upon finding his madeleine. That pastry, not quite equalling the first but still transporting him to that time spent with his grandmother, enjoys a parallel in the Girl Scout cookie. Every time I enjoy a Samoa, or a Tagalong or a Thin Mint (my personal favorite, frozen is best) I think back to the previous occasions on which I enjoyed this same experience. Because although the types have changed (what the heck are Lemonades?), there is still a nostalgic love that comes at the first bite and stays through to the end of the first box. Or the second, third, or tenth. You get it.

That feeling stays with me as a way of accessing my memories as a Girl Scout. I remember with each bite the triumph of building a functional fire, of weaving ghost stories into campgrounds, of making odd houses from yarn and popsicle sticks in the auditorium of my elementary school. The excitement of tracking down the memory of Juliette Gordon Lowe in a pilgrimage to Savannah became a point of pride for the rest of middle school. I remember the selling period every year, making those calls to my family members urging them to buy a box so I could finally get one of those cookie-selling patches. Setting up a table with friends from my troop outside the local Robert's and soliciting with our sweet smiles the pity and hunger of innocent passersby — this became a skill. Cases of cookies in my living room that became boxes in one of our many moves, shopping bags of unsold packages that we as a troop delivered to the neighborhood Ronald McDonald house. I remember the chandelier in their atrium, the long windows in the kitchen, and the somewhat disarming statue of Ronald McDonald seated on a bench on the wide porch of that yellow shotgun double. These images, paired with the generosity we displayed in return for grateful smiles, lie unparalleled in any other experience of my life. Cultivating these memories for a second time, I feel no time has passed. At this point, I have finished my box in the present day.

Although I am certain that not everyone has these associations at that first bite, I know that I will hold them within me forever, closing them away every year until I can recall them the next year, when I can tear off the artifice like a strip of wallpaper on the walls of my imaginings. These are the moments that I live for, those in which I can return to a place where I felt safe, and relive the innocence I so unwittingly had at that time.

Trust me when I say that I'll be back next Friday in line for another box.