Mud Puddles and Petticoats
When I was growing up I attended the local Baptist Church, and so did my two cousins, Johnny and Ginger. During the church service we always sat together on the same pew and we’d often make plans to go to one of our houses after church and spend the afternoon; sometimes it took wearing our parents down until they would finally give in (I guess they had experienced too many times the trouble we’d get into when we were together (I began to fully understand this when I became a parent).
It was on one of these Sundays that Johnny and Ginger begged their mom and dad for me to come home with them. They probably had misgivings due to the fact that it was raining, and we’d probably end up inside thus destroying any thoughts they had of enjoying a peaceful Sunday afternoon. But, the begging paid off and the three of us loaded into the backseat of their family car.
Sitting still in church for an hour (we were Baptists so that hour was always much longer) caused us to have a lot of pent-up energy. As my uncle drove the back road, which was the closest route to their house, the three of us were behind him being loud and picking on each other. Apparently this behavior was distracting to my uncle (understandably so) and he scolded us saying he didn’t want to hear another peep out of us. This only meant that we had to torture each other in silence. So, Johnny started thumping us and we’d gang up on him and thump him back; this went on until Ginger and I were getting really irritated at him and he at us.
Then, silently, we began a shoving match. Johnny would shove us across the seat toward the door, then we’d shove him toward his door – he was stronger than us so his shoves made more of an impact; this went on for several minutes until Johnny got an idea; he reached over us, pulled on the door handle and gave one mighty shove – out we went into the road – luckily, we had just crossed the railroad track so the car wasn’t going very fast, but we did bump along before finally making a solid landing smack dab into a mud puddle, our petticoats almost over our heads.
Assessing the damage, we looked at our bare legs that were scratched and scraped and had pieces of gravel imbedded in them with blood streaming down them. We scrutinized each other’s condition – neither of us had fared well, we were a fright! We were covered from head to toe with mud and blood, and our Sunday best a mess to say the least. Then we noticed the car was getting farther and farther away, we were banged up and sore and started to cry, but looking at each other and seeing what a mess we were, we began to laugh and couldn’t stop.
Meanwhile, Johnny was in the back seat laughing his head off; he couldn’t get the words out to tell his dad that we had been ejected from the car. Finally, he pointed backward, my uncle looked in his rear view mirror and saw the two of us sitting there in the middle of the road. He backed the car to where we were and I think he said something like “What made ya’ll do that?” We, of course, pointed to Johnny and both of us began jabbering at once telling him what happened while Johnny played Mr. Innocent and denied the whole thing; he was off the hook, but it was our laughter that did us in, my uncle thought we had jumped out of the moving car on purpose! Now, it’s true we had done some pretty dumb stuff, but even we, weren’t dumb enough to jump out of a moving car!
It’s a funny thing though, to this day Johnny still denies his participation in this mud puddle episode, but when we’re together and the subject comes up, we have loads of fun debating it all over again.
