HOM: Feeling Kinda Jeepish

I got off work one afternoon at GC right after Dad had finished the harvest, and when I crossed the bridge on the way home I decided to take a shortcut. I turned in at Grampa Streit's driveway and headed home across the stubble field. (Grampa Streit & Grampa Handcock had neighboring farms, the Handcock place to the east and the Streit place to the west. The road ran along the north edge of the farms.) I'd never driven much in stubble because my doing so always made Dad mad, I guess because he expected sparks and fires and other bad things to result. Being me, I bypassed expectations. Sparks, but no fire except my burning red face. I was flying pretty low and when I got past the barn and hit the brakes I got a lesson in traction, mainly that wheat stubble doesn't give you any. I hit the fence by Jimmy Weaver's lane nose-first, took out a (luckily) rotten post or two and stretched the woven wire so far that even though the Jeep was in his lane, it was still on my side of the fence. (Weaver's lane paralleled mine, but was far longer.) I spent the next couple of hours folding wire and patching till I had the damaged section back in more or less the condition it was in before I modified it with the Jeep hood. Nobody noticed that the wire was holding up the old posts rather than vice versa, and a few more scars added to my old 4x4 weren't noticeable. TBC (Me) (Blacktail Books)