Long, long ago when I was young you used to hear these interesting sayings. One I remember was, “If the Lord is willing and the creek don’t rise!” In today’s world people wouldn’t understand what that meant. I can remember as a child, my grandparents lived way out in the country. There were no paved roads so they built up the dirt roads with gravel, hoping to keep them passable in bad weather. The road going out to my grandmother’s house was pretty rough. About five miles from from grandma’s there was a creek. You came down the hill, around a curve and suddenly there it was. No bridge, the road just went to the edge of the creek then disappeared into the water. You could look across the creek and see the road start up the bank on the other side. In the summer this wasn’t a problem. During the hot, dry weather you didn’t see more than a trickle of water. Then came spring and after a lot of rain it was a different situation. I can remember seeing my dad ease off into that river a little at a time, watching the water come up closer and closer to the bottom of the truck. The tricky question was, would that truck float down the river? Would the water get up in the engine so it would no longer run? Was the engine strong enough to get the truck across the river to the other side? Most of the time my dad seemed to know how far to push things and we would slip through the water and drive on to grandmother’s house. I can remember a few times when even my father didn’t push his luck with mother nature and we went back home. We don’t think about these things anymore. Even out in the countryside we have blacktop road and bridges. There are very few places in this country that are inaccessible anymore. That’s good if you happen to have a medical emergency, bad if you want some peace and quiet.
Happy reading, Linda