Chapter 37
This has been one of THOSE weeks—no, I’ll make a revision… this has been one of those summers!! And I actually looked forward to a long, lazy summer when things would be relaxed and easy!!
Boy, what a dream! All we’ve done this summer is run, run, run. There’s barely been time for the essentials like letting our hearts beat, blinking and breathing.
Whatever DID happen to those lazy summer days we heard so much about when we were kids. Those wonderful WHOLE days when people went to visit other people and even had time to sit down. And when the visit-ees were actually happy to see the visitors arrive!
I suppose they kinda fell by the wayside when buggies were replaced with cars and when the entire world could go see whom-so-ever they pleased when-so-ever they wanted.
Poppa used to tell stories about when he and his young bride first set up housekeeping in a two-room mansion down in southern Oklahoma. They worked hard all week and visited on Sunday.
This one time they went quite a distance to see a young couple only to find after a long, hot, dusty drive that the other couple had gone visitin’ themselves. Poppa thought it would be right cute to play a prank— “teach ’em to stay home,” he chuckled.
That was the days of unlocked doors. Everybody trusted everybody and no one had anything worth stealing anyway.
So, they walked right in and commenced to let those folks know they had had company while they were gone.
He took the drawers out of the chifforobe and put them in the kitchen, put the two cane bottom chairs on the bed, and made general chaos before they left.
They had a hearty laugh over their ornery stunt. But the next morning when Poppa went to hitch up his wagon to go to town for feed, it was gone.
After a nice long search, he found it—on top of the barn.
While he had been laughing over what HE had done, his friends had paid him a VISIT.
They had dismantled the wagon, took it up on the barn and rebuilt it.
And Poppa lost a day’s doin’s getting the wagon down!
! I bet that day wasn’t one bit lazy or relaxed.
I bet it lacked one whole heck of a lot bein’ much fun either.
But he always laughed when he told the story.
We don’t have a barn, and we don’t have a wagon.
And I guess we will have to agree that it really is PROGRESS—even if it does seem like we are running around in circles!
! I’ll tell you one thing—if I ever had to dismantle a Ford Maverick and bring it down off a rooftop, I don’t think I’d ever be able to LAUGH about it…