Me, Eva and the 3 foot drift...
Well, it doesn't look like much, but that is the 3 foot drift that Eva and I landed in a few weeks ago. We were on our way to town to run some errands and we hit a "patch" of ice that was about, oh, 100 meters long. I skidded this way and that as the back of the truck kept trying to be the front of the truck. And wouldn't you know, it was on a stretch of road that had telephone poles on both sides! I felt like we were on some sort of medievil obstacle course- with Eva screaming like a girl- ok, she is a girl, but it wasn't helping me any. And wouldn't you know it, I was driving my dad's truck as it had been sitting in the driveway for nearly two weeks and he said the battery needed a spin. So it wasn't my old clunker of a jeep, it was his nice, pretty, shiny truck. Finally, I felt that our luck was gonna run out as were were headed for that next-to-last pole, so I just turned the truck around and slid us into the ditch. Now, how come, when the weather is fair you never take notice of which side of the road has the deepest ditch? If I had chosen the other side, I would have landed in 3 inches of snow. As it was, I choose the 3 foot snow drift to land in. It was a fairly soft landing and Eva finally quit screaming- to burst into tears, and I was just so glad I missed that last telephone pole. I felt so foolish- cars started stopping to see if I had a cell phone to call someone- honestly, there is rarely a car on that road, but it was getting time for school to be in, so there were dozens of gawkers- like they never saw anyone in a ditch. Oh well. Dear husband came to the rescue- it was only one mile down the road from our home. He brought my two oldest boys. They were grinning from ear to ear- figure this wasn't something that we could keep in the family. Oh, no, now they have proof. They walk around the truck surveying the predicament I'm in- still all grins. Boys. Then I notice that the 15 yr old is three feet shorter than the 14 yr old. Wonder when they'll notice? Finally, Joe looks up at his little brother and they both burst out laughing. Joe is a hefty fellow- and his size 14 shoes still aren't big enough to hold him on top of the snow. Dan is as thin as a fence rail- and his size 13 shoes were acting like snowshoes- there he was just walking along on top of the snow, while Joe is trudging with snow up to his hips! They came with shovels and salt- gonna dig me out as I am actually on top of the 3 feet of snow. About 30 minutes into it, a second car slides- on the very same place- and ends up in the ditch. I felt a little better. It took almost 3 hours to get me out of there, with the help of 3 more school boys- Brock, Nathan and Brandon- thank you. And just as an aside- naming your child Brock will probably assure that he will be built like a small locomotive and have freckles and red hair. The kid was huge and it felt funny writing, "Please excuse Brock from being tardy- he helped me get out of a ditch." I wonder if it worked. But I don't think these boys are new to being in trouble. Here they all were, sitting shoulder to shoulder in an old beat-up pick-up truck- the type that looks suspiciously like the kind you see out late on Saturday night bashing in mail boxes. (Is that an Indiana thing? Nothing to do, so the youngin's make a sport of taking baseball bats to all the mail boxes on these rural roads. It's really not nice, but once your mailbox is "christened" they rarely hit it again- and as long as the door still works, we all figure we got off pretty light. I see some neighbors have had enough, and they barracade their boxes with scraps of 2x4's. It must work.) I don't mean to malign these young men, but they just had a certain gleam in their eyes- even if they were very handy to have around on that cold and slippery morning. Eva says it was a very exciting day for her.