"The Stash"

As you all are well aware, I've made a few decisions in my life that might make one stop and ask "Hannah, you're an intelligent, quick-witted, and sensual woman, what could have ever made you do that?".  I would just have to say that I have a complicated psyche that is just not understood this day in age. In other words, I make a lot of stupid decisions that I regret later.I think the most recent incident was the Tic-Tac Fiasco, but this one I'm about to tell you about, even though it took place awhile back, definitely takes the cake.

 When I was a sixth grader, I had very few friends, and the friends I did have were also going through the uncomfortable growth spurt that shows up right before middle school. We were all just bopping along, sort of doing our own thing, trying to create a facade that we were totally cooler than we really were. I regret a lot of the decisions I made in sixth grade, but the one that makes me cringe the absolute most was a string of events that I usually sum up by calling "The Stash".

The origin of the stash was sometime in the middle of the  school year. Summer had been long forgotten, but Spring Break was still just a distant dream. Since all of the kids I went to elementary school with were absolutely avid talkers, the teachers gave us seating assignments at the lunch tables to try and cut back the amount of chatter. Unfortunately, they chose to seat us alphabetically, and while some kids got put next to their best friend, I got put next to the grossest kid in our grade. Maybe even our whole school. Let's call him Shawn. The problem was the Shawn probably showered about 5 times a month, so he SMELLED. Imagine trying to enjoy your lunch sitting next to someone who smells like B.O. I would all but gag on my food, so I had to come up with a better way to eat lunch. Since switching seats with someone else was out of the question (you better believe I tried, though), I had to come up with something else that could remedy the situation.

After about a week, I figured out the best possible solution my twelve year old mind could come up with. The idea hit me one day while I was at recess. Since the sixth graders were the biggest kids at the elementary school, we had to walk down a huge flight of brick stairs (71 steps!) to the baseball diamonds, which were surrounded by a big track for recess instead of playing on the playground. Most kids would walk around the track or play kickball, or just sit on the hill. I was one of the track walkers, wasting away many recesses by playing truth-or-dare with a group of cackling girls. While walking around one day, I stopped and took a break on one of the two baseball diamonds, the one that was rarely used. Kicking up the dirt of the baseball diamond, I walked around and I eventually ran into home plate. After some inspection, I realized that I could pick it up, and it wasn't stuck to the ground as I had originally thought.

The funny thing about the home plate was that the sides were thick and stuck deep down into the ground, creating a little air-pocket in between the ground and the top of the base. It was probably about three inches tall. Suddenly, what I thought was a stroke of genius stuck me. I would sneak my lunch outside and hide the remains under home plate!!!


I can't exactly remember why I thought this was a  good idea, but I quickly told all of my friends, and they thought it would work! Of course, I can't blame them for what happened next, it's all on me.

For the next two weeks or so, I'd hide bags of food in my coat pockets each day as we left the cafeteria. Since I hadn't eaten during the actual lunch period, I would sprint down the stairwell to the baseball diamond, and eat my lunch hastily in the dug out. When the coast was clear (aka, no teachers were around), I would run over to home plate and quickly stuff the wrappers underneath it. Home plate became known as "The Stash" to my friends and I, a name that was much too cool for what it was describing. Hiding the wrappers worked for the first five days or so, but in the second week, things were starting to get a little bit cramped under home plate. For some reason I didn't have the foresight to remove the trash once it started getting packed, so I just left it in there.

Then on one cloudy day the jig was up. I knew it from the moment I ran down to the field and saw all of my trash of the last two weeks blowing gently in the wind and across the baseball diamond. The teachers as well as the students were all nonplussed, and everyone was trying to figure out why so much trash had magically appeared on the field. I, for one, ran the hell away from where everyone was, which I didn't realize made me seem really suspicious. Luckily, the event blew over after a week or so, but I'm fairly sure that if you ask some of those teachers if they remember the day when a hoard of mini pretzel bags and half eaten PB&J sandwiches littered the field, I'm sure they would have a very funny story to tell you.