“I was never a fan of math but I really liked my 5th and 6th grade math teacher. One of my favorite times was when we learned to do the electric translation (which is the electric slide) and my teacher danced on the table. It was all with geometric terms. It was definitely one of my favorite classes of all time. But basically my middle school years consisted of dance and musicals.”
“When I was in middle school we went to Prince Edward Island because my sister wanted to go where Anne of Green Gables was from. At one point my dad said, ‘Boys, I’m sorry we have to go on this girly trip.’ So he took us go-karting. I was wearing this superman shirt and we were beating all these college kids. This one guy had words for me because he was with his girlfriend and I made him look bad.”
“The only thing I can remember from middle school is the time I met my best friend, Whitney. We were in the same gym class. It was the rope climbing day. Everyone dreaded that day but I loved it. It was my jam. So we walked in and the mats were set up and the ropes were hanging. Whitney and I were in line watching people going a quarter of the way up, halfway up. Only some of the boys could get all the way up. We were in line thinking, yeah this is going to be my time to shine. We both started climbing at the same time on the two ropes right next to each other. All of a sudden we realized we were both going to get to the top. We looked at each other and for a second it could have been really competitive but we decided instead to just bond and be friends and encourage each other saying, ‘Yeah! Go Whitney! Go Hannah!’ We were climbing up and up and up and then we got to the top and then we got down and then we hugged and then we were actually best friends for the next six years.”
“Once in swim team during 6th grade over the summer we made a golden calf idol shark named Moses. We kept it at the bottom of our lane. At every possible moment when we weren’t swimming we would play with him but the swim coach got mad. She would yell at us but we cannon balled her. Then, the lane at the other end of the pool created Jackie the Dolphin, another false god. And we stole her and threw her in the lake outside our school. They were not getting Jackie back. Then they stole Moses at a swim meet a week later. We were running around screaming looking for him. But concurrently a kid named Billy actually went missing. And we got the entire town to look for Moses. Billy was fine, he was in the passenger seat of his mom’s car. We still have Moses. All is right in the world.”
“After I got my tonsils out in first grade, my brother and dad gave me the glorious gift of a white stuffed rabbit that had blue eyes that I named Rabbi (pronounced ‘rabby’ not ‘rabbi’). Literally this rabbit was my life. I treasured it and I wanted to bestow Rabbi for the whole world to see. So I placed her on top of a desk lamp so that she would be fluorescently glowing. Then my mom was very frantic and told me I almost lit Rabbi on fire. She found her and she had a black burn on her tummy. I was completely panicked. In her efforts to calm me down she got scissors and said ‘We’ll make her new.’ So she just carefully cut out all of the black burn. To this day I still sleep with Rabbi and she still has that hole.”
“We took a field trip to Cow Town in Kansas. We had to dress up in these weird outfits. It was in Kindergarten and there were all the boys and all the girls. The boys had to wear suspenders and all the girls had to wear these little skirts and aprons. When we walked we had to link arms with a boy. My best friend Tina was really excited because she really liked Paul and I really liked this boy named Brock because we had the same name – see, my name was Brooke and his was Brock. And the parent chaperones told me to link arms with him and I was like, ‘No, I am not linking arms with that boy’ even though I really secretly wanted to. Then he didn’t have a partner and neither did I and we were the only ones who didn’t have a partner. On the way back, somehow he ended up with two girls on his arms. And I told him, ‘You’re actually not allowed to have two girls on your arms at the same time.’ And the teacher said, ‘No you’re okay, he’s allowed.’ But they reprimanded me for telling him he wasn’t allowed.”
“The only thing I can think of is… being homeschooled I only had four friends until high school. So we were the only people we hung out with. Living in a rural area also we couldn’t go around the block and kick a ball with the neighbors because all our neighbors were farmers and old people.
I remember a few times when my friends and I got older going through puberty thinking we were the shit you know, we would have air soft wars in our back yard. This one time things got especially heated and the rivalries grew more and more intense. There was this one kid who none of us really liked. One kid on his team was basically a double agent and we were pretending to shoot at him but we were actually shooting at the kid we didn’t like. When it got later, the double agent led him into the tree fort where he said ‘let’s hold up for a while.’ So we busted in and the kid turned on the other one, I got duct tape from the house and we taped him to a chair, shot him in the foot and left. We went back into the house thinking we were so cool and so bad. Then my dad was like, ‘Hey guys where’s your friend?’ This was five minutes after I had asked dad for duct tape so we had to go back and untie him and apologize.”
“Playing kickball during recess comes to mind. I had a big brother – well I have a big brother, still – so I wanted to be like him. I wanted to play sports and be like him. I would come home and tell him that I kicked really far. A lot of my friends who were girls would just sit around in the grass. But I made a point to be picked for kickball. I liked getting encouragement from these eight year old boys saying I was a dude. I would always try to walk next to him when we got to school and he would always run ahead of me. I was really proud when he decided I could walk beside him.”
“In the third grade I … not sure if it was manipulation… I convinced everyone I should be the class president. During recess we would play president and every kid got a role. So I got about five kids in the class to print money. They would cut up pieces of paper and write 100s and 1000s on them. There was a banker and I was president so of course I got the most money. So then of course I had to have a first family. So I had a first lady, some girl in my class named Morgan, and we had kids who were children in the class. Then as president obviously needed secret service. So I had 4-5 guys in the class be secret service agents and we would run around on missions. There was always a security breach and it’d be dramatic. So myself and the first lady would have to get down and secret service would have to rush us to a safe place which was always the cubbies behind the book case.
I also had a speech writer. Every few days i’d give a speech in front of the whole class. Everyone was playing and involved. People made pretend food, there were pretend teachers and I just happened to be the president. I remember this line – I still have some of the paper money in this box at home – ‘time is money and money is time and we have neither of it.’ That was the end of one of my speeches. I think that was to get them to print more money.
So the weird thing is that every teacher since the second grade (I ‘found myself’ in that grade and became outgoing) told me I’d be president some day. To this day, even professors say it.”
“When I was younger, it was my responsibility to push mow the front lawn. One day I was mowing and I felt this bump and I rolled over a hole in which after I rolled past it a dozen baby bunnies jumped out of. They were literally jumping everywhere. I’m like, what is going on? So I turn off the mower. Thankfully not a single bunny was harmed in this episode. So we rounded up the bunnies and took pictures. It’s actually my least favorite picture of when I was younger because I look fat compared to all my friends. But my parents said we couldn’t keep them because they’re wild. We put them outside, went somewhere for a while came back and… there were hawks eating them. so they survived the fight not the war.”
everyday expeditions 