Friday, February 20, 2015

The Run-Away Wagon


Reading my last post I realized that sometimes my mother comes off as a bit of a flake. She was actually the most intelligent person I have ever known. By the same token my mother-in-law was the wisest.

As with many extremely intelligent people my mother did not always exercise her wisdom. Now my mother-in-law was also very intelligent but she had been pretty much on her own since she was a small child. She learned to rely on her wits and she was good at it.

She could size up a person immediately upon meeting them. She was always dead-on accurate in her assessments.

Mom knew exactly the right way to handle a situation. Instinctively she did what needed to be done with no muss, no fuss. I admire that so much.

Mom did not have an easy life. Her parents died when she was too small to really understand what death meant. Add to that the fact that nobody ever told her that they had died and she was a hurt little girl.

But she learned to not only fend for herself she took care of her older brothers and sisters as well. She and my mother were both remarkable women.

But she did have moments of flakiness just like the rest of us.

Mom's older children were going to school before most people had cars. They usually walked to school or someone would hook up a team of horses and drive them or pick them up. When that happened they took or picked up every child and delivered them to where they were going.

After Mom died we discovered a lot of history books. The family is actually mentioned in at least two of the books that recorded local history.

One day Mom had been running errands and decided to pick the kids up after school. It was a nice crisp fall day.

After dropping off all the children who were not hers at their homes she headed for her home with my oldest brother-in-law riding with her.

Somehow the horse got away from her. She and my brother-in-law were in a runaway wagon!

I have a picture in my mind of the ordeal. Mom would have been ordering my brother-in-law to lie flat on the bed of the wagon as she frantically tried to figure out how to stop the horse.

The horse was running as fast as it could finally leaving the road. It ran on and on as runaway horses will do.

Mom finally laid down flat too. The horse was run straight toward the trees. The wagon could hit one and she and her son could be seriously injured if not killed.

There was a huge jerk as the wagon came to a sudden stop.

The horse had run between two trees. They were not far enough apart for the wagon to go between them.

It did go part way. Then the wagon was stuck tight, really tight. But it did stop.

Both my mother-in-law and my brother-in-law escaped with no serious injuries. They were mightily shaken though.

And they now have their names in history books.

14 comments:

  1. Oh these stories you've been sharing to us are like from novels which would entertain many. But these are more than that, they're not created from one's imagination but a narration from one who's got the primary source. Life is indeed full of stories and it's great that people could share them through miles away. :) Very interesting stories!

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    1. Everyone has interesting family stories. An old Irish proverb states that you are what you come from. In order to know what you come from you have to know what your family was like. Then you can truly know yourself.

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  2. Our neighborhood mom's did that, too, if one happened to pick up a child from school. They picked up the rest of the neighborhood kids on the way home. Except, they all got out at that person's house and walked home.

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    1. My husband's family lived on a farm so it was a distance to other farms. It was just a small favor that they did once in a while. If you did for one you did for as many as you could.

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  3. What a frightening episode! I must conclude our horse had no spirit at all. We would loan her to a neighbor to pull his chicken van to the butcher where he like to chat at length. Our horse got bored and brought the van home without him --by all reports obeying traffic rules, even 4-way stops.

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    1. That is a great story. I would have liked to see it happen.

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  4. whew, how frightening must the experience be for them, glad they were not injured at all.

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    1. They were so lucky. My brother-in-law had 7 biological children and 4 step-children. My mother-in-law had 8 more children and at last count about 120 direct descendants.

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  5. Dear Emma, that was luck - to be not hurt by such an adventure! To feel the helplessness when a horse goes through... horrible.
    I learned a new expression by you: to be "a flake". I understand it. In Germany we use it sometimes when a child had been funny/droll.

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    1. Brigitta we are learning so much from each other. The internet is enabling me to be in contact with so many people from different places. My education never stops.

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  6. Hello, greetings and good wishes.

    It was interesting to read the comparison between two wonderful women.

    The story of the run away horse and the miraculous escape is very thrilling, frightening but miraculous.

    Best wishes

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    1. I am glad you noticed the comparison. I was blessed to have two such wonderful women as major parts of my life. The best part is genetics. Those genes have been passed on to my remarkable children.

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  7. I can only imagine the scare! I think we all have our share of such stories.

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    1. These stories are history. I wish everyone would take a couple of minutes to write them so they will not be lost. You so right that we all have them. When I think about how very little I know of my grandfather and his family it makes me sad. How many things are missing from my history because no one knows.

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