The Nicholas Franklin Pierce Memorial Foundation

You know when you're young and you get really excited, like so excited you're physically vibrating? Well, being a kid from Alabama, waking up to snow on the ground was one of the most special treats, one that filled you with that kind of excitement. I still get a mild version of it as an adult when I wake up to snow on the ground, even when I'm in places it's supposed to snow.

Generally speaking my brother and I were like any other teenagers, unmotivated to get out of bed in the mornings, even on a day we were starting a road trip for spring break. On this trip our family of 4 would be driving through Mississippi, Louisiana, and Oklahoma to go to a convention for Dad's work, then on to see cousins in Texas before looping back to Alabama. 

As a family goes, we were a close one. We enjoyed each other's company, and we had so much fun together. Our family spent a lot of time in the car, traveling to Orange Beach every other weekend, some long road trips to South Florida, trips to Washington, DC, North Carolina, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, etc. My mom and brother joked around all the time, pushing each other's buttons, usually until one of them took it too far and they ended up mad at each other. Nick would always sit behind Mom in the car. She would reach back and grab his knee, which was very ticklish. He would kick her seat in retaliation, and we would all be in tears laughing, before they eventually got mad because neither knew when to stop.

One time Nick and I filled the entire back seat with stuffed animals, ready to take them on our adventure. Dad freaked out and made us put them back in the house. We tried to sneak our cat Killer into the car amongst the stuffed animals once, and after that Killer thought he was supposed to get in the car when we were packing it up to go on trips.  Typical cat, he also tried to pack himself into our suitcases every time too!  Dad used to say that our clutter made him feel like he was traveling with a band of gipsies, but we never let that stop us from loading up games, toys, etc. so we could be entertained and surrounded in a cocoon of road trip fun. This was before the time of electronic entertainment devices, so we would eventually get bored, no matter how much entertainment we packed for ourselves. The boredom would lead to Nick and me getting into shoving or finger poking fights, or ridiculous arguments. Mom would pull down the vanity mirror to watch us from the front seat.  She would tell us that we couldn't cross the line of the fabric seam on the back seat, look at each other, or talk to each other, officially pitting us together against her and ending our fights almost instantly. 

This morning was starting out like any other teenager-dragging morning. Dad was ready to go, and we weren't cooperating. So, he thought it would be funny to wake is up in true April Fool's Day fashion... Did I mention that we were leaving for our trip on April 1st? He came racing into our rooms yelling, "It's snowing! It's snowing!" Well, of course, we jumped out of our beds, raced to the windows, ripped back our curtains... to see bright, green grass everywhere! The turkey! It worked. He got us good. We were up, full of adrenaline, and not long after that we were on the road.

Well, Nick and I didn't think his joke was that funny. Most people don't think pranks are funny when they're the victim, and we were no different. We decided we would get revenge. We had driven for about 8 hours, and all of a sudden Nick, in a very convincing, overly excited voice, yelled, "Killer!!!", like he was the most excited kid on the planet that his cat had stowed away in the car with us. Dad immediately hit the brakes and started muttering under his breath about finding an out of town vet, etc. About 2 or 3 minutes later he suddenly realized that Mom wasn't participating in his freak out. When he started to look around, wondering about that, Mom, Nick and I burst out laughing. I guess we shouldn't have shared our revenge plans with her, but we feared the mom-wrath if we left her out, so cutting our prank a little short was still worth it! This is still one of my favorite road trip memories!

-Leigh Ann Speake 4/1/2020