This week, the week before Memorial Day weekend, was the highlight of the school year when I was in second through fifth grade. This was the week we had the ultimate field trip, five days and four nights staying overnight on Cape Cod. Our hippie-leaning alternative school participated in a nature-based learning program where we did things like eat sea pickles we found growing in the marsh and sing songs about bugs such as "Head, Thorax, Abdomen" to the tune of "Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes."
I have clear memories of each year I went on the trip. In second grade, the most popular girl in the class was mysteriously ill for days before disappearing in the middle of the night. The rest of us speculated that she had died, but it turned out that she was suffering from undiagnosed asthma and had been sent home. Third grade was the year the temperatures dropped far below average for the time of year and we shivered in multiple layers of sweatshirts and shivers. In fourth grade, I spent the week with my right arm in a blue cast, my limb broken from a fall from my swing set a few weeks earlier. And in fifth grade, the girls in our cabin followed the annual tradition of sneaking out to meet the boys. We were a little on the lame side and had the have the "sneak out" facilitated by our adult chaperones. We played a very tame version of Spin the Bottle as our teacher looked on.
Good, good times.
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