an essay

What I Did on Spring Break
by Heather K
March 15, 2011

On one spring break I went to New England with my best friend. Her name is Courtney, and she has brown hair, like mine, but hers is long, which mine isn't, but we're still friends. We went on a plane that left before the sun was even in the sky, and the night before we ate an entire package of Oreos because if we didn't they would've gone bad. But we didn't think about our stomachs going bad, which they did after we ate the whole package of Oreos.

When we were in Connecticut we did a lot of things like eat M&Ms and eat chocolate cake and eat chocolate cookies that came out wrong but still tasted good. When we were in Massachusetts we also did a lot of things like eat fudge and when we were in Rhode Island we did lots of things like eat Dunkin' Doughnuts. But there are a lot of other things in New England besides chocolate that we did.

Like for instance we spent a long time in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery where a lot of famous writers are buried and got a big surprise when they found out about God, because they were Transcendentalists. Woops! Courtney and I tried to find a bathroom, but evidently dead people don't pee, so we had to find one in one of the shops downtown (a bathroom, not a dead person). But before we left I got to see where my favorite author was buried, Louisa May Alcott, and I got to tell her how much she means to me, even though she probably couldn't hear me. But that was pretty special. And then we saw a tombstone where someone's name was "BLOOD" and that made us laugh.

We were supposed to go to Boston but we ended up spending all day in Concord and that was okay with me because I also got to see the place where the Revolutionary War started. It started because there was a gunshot, and the people in red thought the people with farm equipment fired it while the people with farm equipment thought the people in red fired it, so there was war. This is why you always tell the truth and don't try to cover up what you did wrong, because what if the guy who fired the shot did it on accident, but was too scared to admit it because he didn't want to get in trouble? I know that's happened to me and if it weren't for my brother my parents never would have found out about the stain in the basement where we spilled ink and I tried to cover it with a rug.

We also got to pretend to be people in the war, except I think maybe I was a viking at one point. I'm not sure if there were vikings in the Revolutionary War, but New England's by an ocean, so there might've been.

One of my favorite things that we did was go to the Yankee Candle Factory, because there was a lot of stuff to play with even though we probably weren't supposed to play with it, like a horn we pretended was from Gondor and some candles that were supposed to smell like your wedding day. We also stole some fudge but it was an accident. Well, not really, but we tried really really hard not to, so it was kind of an accident. I got peanut butter and I don't remember why kind Courtney got.

Some other fun things we did were go to Yale and accidentally join a tour group (this time it really was an accident), but we just pretended we were actually interested in going to Yale and nobody suspected we were impostors. This time I did not pretend like I was a viking. But on our way to Yale we played 20 questions and it was Courtney's dad's turn to pick something for us to guess, and when he did my first guess was "jaws of life" and it was right. I am really good at playing games.

One day I got to go with Courtney to her barn where her horse lives with some other very angry horses, and I got to put hay in the field for them but then I had to run very fast because they were running toward me very very fast. This was before Courtney got the whip out.

Also one day we played on the rocks in Rhode Island by the Vanderbilts' summer cottege which is one million times bigger than my house which I live in all of the seasons. We pretended like we were mermaids and sang "Part of Your World" while the waves came up around the rocks, because obviously we are like fish compared to people like the Vanderbilts.

As you can see, Courtney and I did a lot of things on spring break, and a lot more things that are not recounted here (just like Jesus in the Bible). Like when we watched Australia and I don't remember anything about it except there was a stampede of cows, and I only remember that because Courtney and I still laugh about it. Or when Courtney thought one of the stores was "Balloons and Bosoms" when really it was "Balloons and Blossoms." Or when a woman held up a porcelain bunny in an antique shop and asked Courtney if she'd pay that much for it, and Courtney said, "Maybe if it was a bigger bunny." Or the time we went ice skating and Courtney looked very graceful, and I was very graceful too, but Courtney was graceful on her feet while I was graceful more on my stomach.

And that is what I did on my spring break. The end.

Newport, Rhode Island, March 15, 2009