Each summer, our town celebrates its annual Heritage Days Festival.  There are arts and crafts, quilt shows, entertainment, a carnival, fireworks and lots more, all to celebrate the rich history that all started when a widow and her nine children settled here in 1810.

This event can never pass without bringing to mind an incident that occurred during Heritage Days.  While everyone else frittered away their time downtown, I was at home with Smuffy, where the real action took place.  I may not have journeyed via rough country in a wagon or crossed rivers with nine children in search of a better life, but I do live with Smuffy and that has to count for something in the annals of courageous women.

I paid the man at the muffler shop, hopped in my classic 1965 Studebaker Cruiser and headed for home.  Now that the exhaust had been fixed and the tires rotated, my snazzy ride purred like a kitten and was ready for the road.  Smuffy, with more of my help than I ever intended to supply, had re-built the car from the rusted floor boards up, given it a new coat of its original Bermuda Brown, and we were enjoying our love affair with it at last. It would become my everyday driver. When the sun hit those purple metallic flecks in the paint, it made me smile.

When I arrived home, Smuffy announced that the brakes needed fine tuning.  “Park it anywhere you like,” he said.  “I have to move it to flat ground so I can take it out of gear.”  I left the car halfway down the hill that is our driveway and went into the house.

A breeze stirred through the open windows, making it a perfect summer evening.  I paused as I loaded the dishwasher to answer the door and took the friend who dropped by to the kitchen with me for a chat while my daughter wandered off to her room for a bit.

Outside my kitchen window, a giant yew hedge grew along the side of the driveway at the bottom of the hill, screening in our patio.  These bushes were Smuffy’s pets and in his pride over their prosperity, he’d let them grow so tall that they now stretched to over twelve feet in height, flaunting their tops above the railing of the upper deck.  Being a lover of natural light, I hated the things.

Suddenly, an unidentifiable noise interrupted our conversation.  My head jerked in the direction of the window and I saw the tops of the yew bushes jerk violently east and west – mostly east.

I’ve lived with Smuffy for a long time.  “What is that man doing now?” I thought to myself and my first assumption was that he had climbed into our boat and fallen out into the bushes while trying to do some oddball repair that really should only have been tackled by a crew of six.  These occurrences are common enough at my house and, besides, I didn’t really feel like disrupting the flow of conversation with my friend to go outside and investigate.

Our daughter, known as Pookie here on the blog, appeared in the kitchen.  She’d heard the noise as well and told me later than her first thought was, That sounds like the exact same noise I heard the time Dad left the truck in gear and it rolled down the driveway and into a tree.  Well…

My friend showed more concern than either of us.  She seemed convinced that the sort of noise we’d heard could only mean an accident.  Her insistence, the fact that I didn’t hear Smuffy holler and the fact that the tops of those bushes had never sprung back into place finally gave me the nudge I needed to venture outside.

I opened the side door and started down the deck steps.  The first things I saw were the wide eyes of my neighbor as she rushed down my driveway.  When we all reached the bottom and turned to see what she saw, we got the full picture.  Our boat, a 1957 all-wood run-a-bout, had been parked on flat ground at the bottom of the driveway.  Rather than move it, Smuffy had decided to adjust the car’s brakes on the flat area at the top of the driveway, where he had jacked it up and taken it out of “park”, which, apparently, is a must in these situations.

The important thing for a mechanic to remember, which he didn’t, was to put the car back in “park” before letting the jack back down.  Our excited neighbor said she’d seen poor Smuffy sitting on the asphalt, gripping the back bumper with all his might and with heels dug in, but all to no avail.  He finally turned it loose and, as usual, God blessed us in the midst of our own stupidity.

The Stude (pronounced STOO-dee), as we say in classic car lingo, rolled all the way down the driveway and struck the spare tire attached to the side of the front end of the boat trailer.  This sent the trailer and boat back and north, into our rock wall flower border.  The boat jolted off the back of the trailer and onto the rock wall, coming to rest in the rose bushes and day lilies.  The car continued north-ish and plowed into the yew bushes, becoming wedged in such a great tightness that it could not be driven out.  Though it had left the driveway, the bushes had kept it from hitting the deck supports and from falling onto the patio below.  The driver’s front wheel nested firmly in the large lower branches and there she sat.

The application of a chain and a truck to pull on it with had no effect whatsoever.  Smuffy was forced to forget the chain and get the chain saw.  After the bushes were sufficiently mangled beyond any hope of salvation, the truck and chain were, at last, put to good use and I tried to stifle my inward YIPPEE! lest it crush the spirit of my beloved.

Afterward, we made an assessment of just how blessed we were.  The wood boat, though displaced to be sure, came out unscathed!  Ruining that would have been a sad thing, for it was a beauty.  One year, pulled behind Smuffy’s 1963 Studebaker Champ pickup and filled with area homeschoolers celebrating summer vacation, it won first place float in the Heritage Days parade.

Its trailer suffered minor damages.  The rock wall proved to be sturdy and didn’t have a single rock dislodged.  Believe it or not, our classic Stude received only scratches!  Over time, we’ve often been compensated for doing without such things as automatic windows and other modern frills and felt the warm gladness that comes from driving an antique made out of real metal! Later, finding the original color discontinued, I used my creative influence and Smuffy repainted it in Prowler Purple!

The yew hedge suffered total loss, but since I’d been begging for years for it to be cut down, I could only shout, “Hallelujah!” and offer up a great big, “Thank You, Jesus!” that it was the back bumper Smuffy had been attached to when the car went rolling and not the front.

The seat of Smuffy’s jeans, a portion of his backside and a smidgeon of his pride received a chafing that healed in due time – well, maybe not the jeans.  He admitted later that he’d actually been able to use his brute strength to stop the car from going down the hill – he just couldn’t answer the question that entered his mind as to what to do with it once he’d captured it, so he let go, closed his eyes and hoped for the best.  In retrospect, I’m glad he didn’t start shouting for me to come outside, jump in and apply the brakes because, odds are, I would have tried!

After the fact, we came to enjoy the whole incident as an unplanned burst of excitement.  How often in this life do you get to provide that much entertainment for your neighbors?  Most of them missed it, though.  The neighborhood had emptied out when they all went downtown for Heritage Days, leaving only our neighbors to the North to join us in the fun.

The aftermath left the crash site in a state that took a good amount of time and effort to restore and although I took several photos of the Stude stuck in the hedge with Smuffy employing every means at his disposal to dislodge it, not a single one turned out.  We can blame that on the dim light of the setting sun, but more than likely it’s because I laughed so hard I couldn’t steady the camera.

Time has passed – much time – and still I wait patiently for someone else’s husband to do something ridiculous that causes their car to come careening along our street and, without harming a single soul, wipe out the thorny, icky bushes Smuffy planted at the top of the driveway that I can’t stand.

Oh, well, God will find a way!

You might want to start at the beginning of my Life With Smuffy and read about our Smokin’ Hot Honeymoon.  For sheer entertainment, you’ll want to see how Smuffy Takes the Cure and catch up on his river adventures here and here.

Once in a while, I have a “Lucille Ball moment” of my own and if you missed it, you might want to check out, Don’t Blame the Cat – The Spaghetti Squash Did It! 

Comments?  I’d love to hear from you.  Just scroll back up and click on “Leave a Comment” under the title of this post.  On a mobile device, this may appear all the way to the bottom of the post.