I woke up the next morning in the familiar little daybed that I shared with my older brother. I remembered laying down to sleep last night on a quilt on the kitchen floor but here I was in a warm cozy bed. For a moment thought we were back in the old camp car but when I opened my eyes and saw the soft glow from a kerosene lamp shinning through the doorway from the kitchen, we didn’t have doorways in the camp car, and with the added smell of hot biscuits and oatmeal, I knew I wasn’t dreaming.
About that time Dad came in carrying an armful of wood for the heating stove and hollered at us, time to rise and shine, and starting with that day and lasting through my growing up years, 5:00 am was time to rise and shine and 9:00 pm was shoe pulling time.
After breakfast, everybody sat around the table talking. I guess that was our first family meeting and these continued off and on down through the years with everybody sitting around the kitchen table talking. There were a lot of subjects discussed during these times from family history to predictions about what the future would be like.
There was another first for me that day. It was the first and only time I ever rode in a car with Mom driving. And to my knowledge the only time she ever drove, although if you asked her, she would say she could drive.
My uncle, Mom’s brother had spent the night and we were taking him home. While going down the mountain we met a guy on his way up driving a pickup truck. When Dad pulled the car over to let him go by the car got stuck in the deep ruts. The man driving the pickup was the same man who had sold Dad the little farm. He stopped, got out, and after looking at the situation took a fence rail out of the back of his truck and tried using it to pry the car loose but couldn’t do it himself so Dad asked Mom to steer the car while he helped get it unstuck. She got under the wheel and asked Dad what he wanted her to do. He told her to push the clutch in and hold it until he said go then to let it out slowly and when the car started moving to push it in and stop. He reached across and pulled the hand throttle out a little and walked back to the rear of the car. Dad told my uncle to push while he helped lift on the rail. They gave a big lift on the rail and Dad said go. Mom let the clutch out and the car jumped forward. She did exactly as he said and pushed the clutch back in but the car kept moving and ran off the road and over the embankment.
She said Dad hadn’t told her to push on the brake.
There wasn’t any damage to the car, they were tough in those days. It just so happened that there was an old mining road just below where she went over and by moving a few small fallen trees and running over some brush Dad was able to drive on down the hillside to that road and follow it out to the main road.