"Yeahhhhhh...."

Yesterday was one of the best days of my life, which surprised me, really, because I only got three hours of sleep the night before. In my experience, nights with three hours of sleep are not usually precursors of great days, but yesterday proved to be a delightful exception. I went to bed at 12:30 a.m. and woke up at 4:00 a.m. when Sean texted me to say they'd finally landed in Honolulu. He also informed me that he won the Halfway to Hawaii Contest--meaning that he correctly guessed the time at which the airplane was exactly halfway to Hawaii, and thus won a bottle of wine. I AM SO PROUD! After that I couldn't fall back to sleep--probably because I'd been binge sleeping all day Thursday and a lot of Friday. My body was basically glutted with sleep, and could take no more. At least, that's the only possible explanation I can come up with for why I found myself so uncharacteristically wide awake through the wee hours of Saturday morning. I waited til 6:30 a.m. and then got up to take a shower and get ready for the day.

Megan's friend Sarah picked us up and took us to the train station where we took the commuter rail to Boston's North Station. There we caught another train and started rolling out of Boston's massive industrial landscape toward the woods, fields, and ponds of Concord. There's nothing quite like an old friend. We flew down the rails, munching on tortilla chips and laughing about old Mark Lowry comedy videos. Example: "What happens when two women love the same man, and that man is UGLY?"

Forty minutes later we alighted in the unwittingly charming town of Concord, Massachusetts. Shouldering our bags, we followed the directions of Megan's hand-drawn map, and walked to the downtown area, which was filled with old bookstores and antique shops, and a million other quaint distractions, but we had only one purpose: Orchard House. We walked briskly down Lexington, a road lined with beautiful New England houses, so stately and inviting at the same time, and yards filled with daffodils, crocuses, and forsythia...and then we rounded a corner and there it stood. Megan grabbed my arm and we stood there for a moment in disbelief, but then we went and immediately signed up for a guided tour of the house. It was so unbelievably awesome! We got to see the desk where Louisa May Alcott wrote Little Women, we got to see actual paintings done by May Alcott (Amy), we even got to see the big old barn that Bronson built to host his Philosophy meetings in the back yard. They had music from the Little Women soundtrack playing throughout the house, and it was like a dream come true.

During the tour, we befriended Riley, an 8th grade boy who was tagging along with his parents for a sight-seeing trip in Concord. He and I went to sit outside after the tour was over, and I asked him if we could get a ride with his parents back to downtown, since we were starving for lunch. So these friendly strangers took us back to town, and we ate lunch at a bustling cafe, and then explored a couple used bookstores and antique shops, where I inevitably found some treasures that I simply had to make my own: Most notably, a small copy of King Lear printed in the 1800's with which I immediately fell in love, and some old, handmade Concord lace which I am going to wrap around my bridal bouquet.

After our shopping expedition (and running into Riley again in the antique store, which was called "Thoreauly Antiques), Megan and I set off for Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. The cemetery is only a short walk from the downtown area, and we found it easily enough, and entered through Author's Gate, in search of the famous Author's Ridge. We had been in the old and vast cemetery for maybe a minute before I cried out, "PROCTOR!!!!!" in a voice thick with emotion. Standing before me was a large obelisk reading, "Proctor," in stone carved letters. Try as I might, I couldn't convince myself that it didn't belong to my most beloved John Proctor, and I was nearly hyperventilating with the excitement of seeing his grave. Next we found Emerson's tomb, and then the Alcott family's, then Hawthorne, and finally Thoreau. At each one we paid our deepest literary homage, and I thought that if we spread out our blanket and sat down amongst these long dead writers, I could probably write something beautiful and inspired, with the words simply flowing out of my pen. But I didn't bring anything to write on or with--just a book to read in case the train rides got long--so we found a shady spot, and sat down to rest--since by then our bodies were rapidly tiring.

After a lovely rest in the shady graveyard, we set out for our next destination: Lexington and Concord--site of the first battle of the Revolutionary War, and the shot heard round the world. As meaningful as it was to see Orchard House, I don't think anything compares to the Concord battleground, where you can see the land on which the British soldiers stood and then, across Old North Bridge, the land on which the farmers and Minute Men assembled to defend their lives and fight for their freedom. I got tears in my eyes (and if they had been playing, "Proud to Be an American" in the background, I would've fallen down weeping) as we gazed on the birthplace of our nation. I kept imagining Paul Revere riding his horse like mad through the countryside, pounding the turf between Boston and Concord and shouting, "The British are coming!" and all the brave men and boys who grabbed their guns, and, with the insatiable courage which makes me so proud of my country's history, went out to fight the greatest army in the world at that time. Magnificent! I was near bursting with patriotism and pride.

We lingered there as long as we could, taking in the peacefulness and quiet, which made it so difficult to imagine the terrain filled with soldiers and guns and blood and war. We finally headed back to town, walking past the Old Manse where Hawthorne lived when he first got married, and the vegetable garden that Thoreau planted for them as a wedding gift. We dragged our weary bodies back to the train station, and caught our train back to Boston, and an hour and a half later we caught another train back to Gordon.

The best days are the ones in which you earn your rest, and fall into bed to, as Megan says, "Sleep hard on clean white sheets." Of course, the best days are also the ones spent stuffing your eyes with wonder, as Bradbury describes it. And the very best days are those spent with the ones you love the most.