It was a brisk, overcast Sunday afternoon at my family’s tree farm, the Ganim Tree Farm, and for the first time in what seemed like forever, there was not one customer looking for a tree. I, along with my friends Matt and Anthony, had been hired by my dad to sell trees like he did when he was our age. Along with the three of us, my sister, Grace, along with my cousin Lindsay (who is Grace’s age), ran a bake sale at the farm. We had not eaten anything for lunch yet and forgot to pack food that day, and we were starving. It was bad especially being that we were outside in the bitter cold all day.  

As the minutes passed we sat on the back of my grandfather’s golf cart that we used sometimes for hauling large trees up to the customer’s cars.

“We should get a pizza or something,” Matt suggested.

“Yeah, you should ask your dad,” Anthony said.

“He told me to pack my own lunch today so I probably shouldn’t ask….wait! I have a good idea though!”

“Shoot,” says Anthony before I can get all the words out.

“Why is it fair that Grace and Lindsay get to sit inside all day in the heat and eat cookies all day?”

“Never really thought about that,”

We were about to have a little fun with my younger cousin and sister. Fun to us.

 

“What are we going to do, kick them out?” Matt asked jokingly.

“Yes, and have us a thanksgiving feast,” I replied confidently.

“Ahhhh,” Anthony grunted at the sound of that. He always loved the idea of doing stealth missions, and eating any type of junk food.

I think my idea was going to work.

______________________________________________________________________________

I decided to go into the office and suggest that they advertise their business to the customers in the field, while Matt and Anthony waited at the other office entrance for me to be done.

“You guys sure this will work?” Matt asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

I entered the office, Grace and Lindsay sitting there talking about dumb TV shows that I absolutely despised. I sat down casually for a minute, then on my way out decided to pull it off.

“You guys busy?”

“No, why?” Grace replied.

“We have some people with little kids who might want some cookies, so maybe you should go advertise to them, none of them have picked trees yet,” I told them.

“Hey, why not, as long as you watch the register,” Lindsay adds.

“Sure,”

“Okay then,” Grace says agreeingly.

I stayed by the window, making sure they were out of sight, and opened the other door for Anthony and Matt, and they were both laughing at how clueless they were, and I was not laughing because I had adjusted to them always living in a world of their own.

I grabbed an empty bag and filled it with cookies, putting in about 12 of them. 4 each. Then we walked outside and sat on the back of my grandfather’s green golf cart, which was used in case we needed to haul large trees that we could not carry to the baler. It was a crisp, cold and cloudy day here in Easton, wind blowing the pine needles around the parking lot, and the smell of Christmas trees mixed with the exhaust from the cars passing on the busy road. I tasted the delicious, soft chocolate chip cookies in my mouth and felt my heavy work boots applying pressure on my feet, hanging off the tailgate of the cart.

“It can’t be long until the girls realize there’s no one here,” Matt informs.

“True,” Anthony and I say in unison.

Luckily, we were able to see the girls long enough before they approached to put our cookies away, shoving them quickly into our pockets. They ran up to the cart shortly later.

“There’s no one here,” Grace said, sounding like she was almost asking what was going on.

“Once you two left, the families came up from the other fields and left,” Matt said.

They walked in, annoyed that they had to lift a finger, even for themselves. We each still had 2 or 3 cookies left each and we were making them last. I wasn’t worried, being that the girls would be recovering from their long, painful venture into the fields. I then looked up and saw Grace exit the office, heading towards my grandmother’s house across the lot. We shoved the cookies in our pockets quickly as she quickly flashed a look at us, then grew an angry look on her faces.

As me and my friends sat there eating our cookies, I heard a door slam loudly.

“Tom!” I heard a familiar girl’s voice shout. It was my little sister, Grace.

I chewed quickly in order to reply to her unsuspiciously.

“Yes?”

“Where are the cookies?”

“What cookies?” I asked back, acting like I was unaware of what was happening.

“Give them back, guys!” I heard another girl’s voice shout, the voice being my cousin, Lindsay. She darted toward us out of the office.

“Guys, get in the cart!” I shot quickly at Anthony and Matt.

As Lindsay ran toward us, Grace behind her, we quickly drove off, guarding our stolen stash of cookies, knowing they could not chase us for long.

 

As the cold wind hammered our faces as we barreled down the fields in the golf cart, none of us could stop laughing as we saw Grace and Lindsay panting as they chased us. We started to get farther away and they stopped running, and with one hand on the wheel I grabbed a cookie out of my pocket and waved it at them, Lindsay shouting at me to give it back. As we drove farther into the field, I noticed a large pile of topsoil that we could pull the cart behind without being seen, so we pulled behind it and ate our cookies.

“That worked,” Anthony said while chugging a can of Pepsi and finishing off his cookies.

“I told you so,” I replied.

We finished our cookies and drove in the cart back to the farm office, simultaneously noticing a couple and two kids exiting their white Toyota minivan. Matt then jumped out of the cart voluntarily to give the family a saw. Anthony and I went into the office to get some water, and before we even made it into the door we started being lectured by Grace and Lindsay.

“Why did you steal the cookies?”

“We paid for those!” (lie, my dad bought them the cookies to sell)

“Stealing is wrong!”

“I’m telling Grandma!”

“You are paying for them!”

“I’VE HEARD ENOUGH!” I shouted angrily. I bickered with them a bit more before finally leaving the office to help a family, not agreeing to pay for what we stole. I couldn’t help but notice that Anthony had chugged 2 more cans of Pepsi and could not control his laughter. In no way did I feel bad about taking those cookies and neither did my friends. Their reactions could not have been better. Nope.

 

Mission accomplished.