[A few seconds of the end of a cover of “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn]

Gooooood morning! For those of you just tuning in, my name is Dandelion. I’m  your host on this fine summer morning, Just like every morning, ever since the world ended. You just heard my rendition of “We’ll Meet Again” by Vera Lynn. Or, well–I like that version the best, but in the days of big band music everybody covered the same songs, so maybe you know it from somebody else, I dunno.

Let’s take a look at today’s weather. I usually do my show from the kitchen table, but today I was missing Nana too much and I had to come out to the porch. So I can give you the rundown on today’s weather from experience! 

That heat wave finally broke and it’s finally safe enough to go outside again. It’s maybe ninety-five degrees? I guess you’d call it partly cloudy but there are only a few clouds so beware of UV radiation! You know, last summer I got a nasty sunburn that blistered and got infected. It was so bad I got a fever, but the town healer had some cold medicine that hadn’t gone bad so I got better. Thank goodness! I could’ve died from a sunburn of all things! Learn from my mistakes, dear listener: cover up!

It looks like we’ll get a thunderstorm later, though. I can see looming black clouds over the ocean in the distance. Luckily, they probably won’t be here for a few hours. My garden definitely needs the rain so this is exciting news! My strawberries are finally growing fruit, by the way. Any idea what I can make with them?

On days like this, before the war, my Nana always used to open up the windows, turn on the radio, and spend all day baking bread. I used to sit at the kitchen table and watch her work, and while we waited for the bread to proof or bake she would bring out her paints and some canvases and we would spend hours making our masterpieces. They’re all still hanging on the kitchen wall. That’s why I’m outside. There’s too many memories in the house today.

Alright, it’s time for today’s top story.  When I was ten or eleven, my Girl Scout troop went on a hike. Not just any hike, though, we were there to go geocaching.

Geocaching is like going on a treasure hunt where the treasure is a dirty wet piece of paper in a Ziploc that you get to write your name on. Sounds fun, right? Back in the day there were websites you could use to find a geocache’s approximate location, and then you’d have to hunt them down. I mean, sometimes they were pretty cool–like, you might have to use a magnet to lift up a metal box up out of a pipe or something, but most of the time they weren’t. 

My friend Buckthorn says they’re making a comeback out in the wilderness. Personally, I don’t think geocaching would be what I need to spice up my life of adventuring, but to each their own.

After my Girl Scout trip, most of us forgot about it immediately. I mean, it was boring, the treasure was literal trash, and we got lost on the way out of the woods. It wasn’t anything we wanted to do again, except for my friend Myra. 

Myra was so weird. A couple years after this, she started collecting bones, cleaning them, bleaching them. That’s the kind of weirdo she was. But I thought she was so cool.

I was kind of obsessively keeping tabs on what she was into, so I knew that she kept going geocaching after our trip. She loved it, but one day at school she complained that after their latest hike, her parents told her they didn’t want to geocache again. Myra was heartbroken. When you’re eleven, if your parents don’t want to do something, you just can’t do it. 

Suddenly, I have an idea–If I volunteer to go geocaching with her, I can spend time with her and make her feel better. Then, when we hang out, Myra will see how cool I am! 

I took the jump. Myra’s eyes lit up and she reached across the lunch table to squeeze my hands and she said: “Really? You like geocaching too? I didn’t know!”

And I said, “I love it!” You know, like a liar. 

I didn’t start to like geocaching. In fact quite the opposite! But I got a lot of practice pretending to be impressed by rusty lunch boxes, or creepy dolls with removable heads. Geocaching was boring, dirty, and I got headaches from bending and peering under logs and bushes. We once searched for an hour and a half to find an old coffee tin. But I can’t say I had any regrets, because my plan was working. 

We had so much time to talk while we were hunting that we easily became best friends. I learned that she had super dry humor, and she always laughed at my jokes. And she always gave me more credit than I deserved when we did our mission debriefs with the parents. But I also learned that Myra got frustrated easily. Usually I had to urge her to keep looking when she was ready to give up.

On our six month anniversary of being geocaching buddies, we wanted to try an island cache. After a lot of begging and promising to be safe, my parents hauled out the two-person kayak from the back of our shed. For once I had to fight them so they wouldn’t come with us. They could watch from the shore as we rowed the short distance over the pond, it would be fine. Haha, yeah.

There were red flags from the start. I woke up early for the long drive, and the clouds were gray and dreary above us the whole way. As we pulled onto the road that would lead us to the trail, droplets started to pepper the windshield. 

Myra didn’t even seem to notice the weather. Usually I didn’t care that she was having a better time than me, but today I just couldn’t stand how unbothered she was. We were gonna get soaked just to sign a damp freaking paper on what should have been this great day!

Despite the rain, we started down the trail. By the time we got to the shore, the drizzle had become a steady stream. My raincoat kept me dry, but I was cold down to my bones. I wanted to go home, but Myra looked so excited when we reached the water, so I rolled my eyes behind her back and got in the boat. 

Paddling a kayak is a lot harder than you think it is, you know. Especially when your rowing team is two inexperienced fifth graders and it starts to pour. There was only a hundred feet between the shore and island, and we had made it twenty when the sky started pelting us.

I asked Myra, “Should we turn back?” and she shouted back to me over the drumbeat of rain on the water, “No.” I nearly cried. 

When we got to land Myra still refused to give up. She demanded we try to find the geocache anyway, despite the fact that everything was going wrong. I was so mad. She always wanted to quit when a cache was hard, why was she being so stubborn now?

At this moment, stomping after Myra, I realized that I need to stop geocaching. I’m starting to hate Myra for doing this to me, and she doesn’t even know!

But what’ll happen after I confess to the fact that I’ve been lying this whole time? Myra will never want to speak to me again. She’ll think I’m manipulative and mean and I’ll lose my best friend. My life will be over. But I know I can’t let this go on. This lie is going to ruin our friendship either way. 

Through the howling wind and thundering rain, I say, “Actually Myra, I hate geocaching and I was just lying to have a reason to hang out with you!”

And she says, “Oh, thank god.”

Turns out she didn’t like geocaching nearly as much as she thought, and after a while she was only going because she thought I liked it, and she wanted to hang out with me! After I fessed up, we actually ended up becoming even better friends. When this storm hits later today, take my advice and avoid kayaking. 

Before we get back to music, I’d like to take a moment to thank our sponsors. As always, thank you to Nana for investing in solar panels and a good generator, basically all the stuff that lets me make this show, and also cook food! Thank you to my dad for leaving me his old radio stuff, of course. And today especially a big thank you to my voice lessons from six years ago for bringing music I can’t find to the show. 

Finally I’d like to thank my friend Buckthorn for doing the valiant and brave work of a resource scout. He always makes room in his bag to bring me any CD’s he can find, and I am so grateful for him. Soon is a song from an album he brought me last week, “Chiquitita” by ABBA. But first, I have a song I’d like to play you myself, if you don’t mind. Here’s “I Will”. 

[A few seconds of the beginning of “I Will” by The Beatles]

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