The Road and the Miles to – – Knoxville

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Jack gets in over the wire with plenty to spare for a change –

For most of my life, living in Scotland, a long car drive took an hour and if it took two hours that was a very long drive and would require sandwiches and a thermos of tea. Scotland is a small country!

Now that I’m living in the US I’ve had to re-calibrate. A short drive is two hours and a long one can be as much as eight or ten. The US is a big country!

We visited friends Dirk and Martha in South Carolina last weekend and that meant a four hour drive down and the same back, although we did take a break at ‘Frugal McDoogals’ on the way down to stock up on cheap alcoholic bevvies.

Are we going home now?

Wendy had taken our dog Bruce down to stay with her parents a few days earlier. They live outside Knoxville Tennessee, so that was a three hour trip for her. When it was time for him to come home yesterday I drew the short straw. So I left home at eight in the morning, arrived at eleven thirty, stayed for an hour then headed back. On the way home and just outside Knoxville a semi (artic for my Scots friends) had overturned into the side culvert and burned so a lane was closed for miles while it was dealt with. That added half an hour onto my time.

I was so tired on the last ten miles that I could hardly keep my eyes open and ran a red light coming into town!

I worked out later that in the seven and a half hours I had driven I could have flown to Scotland.

The Monday 300-lb. Stove

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Jack and I bought some forested land, and began hunting a good deal on a wood stove. When a brand-new one popped up on marketplace super-cheap, the nice man we bought it from loaded it into our truck with his brother. They slid a cheap piece of plywood under it to keep the legs from digging the carpet.

There it lay for the next three weeks, feet toward the steering wheel, aimlessly humming a tune to itself as it waited… and waited… and waited….

We tried friends, family, neighbors. Everybody was busy. It’s a hard time of life and a hard time of year. Plus, we really hate to be those sweet-but-annoying elderly neighbors who need help every twenty minutes.

But when my opportunity to pick up a full load of donations for a community project coincided with the stove still taking up 2/3 of the trunk, Jack and I did some math and hatched a plan.

We gathered every quilt, duvet, and rug in the house, including a sheep fleece headed to some community work of its own next week. We added three tarps, drove to the property, and piled the soft stuff as high as the bumper of the car, fleece below a tarp to avoid the barnyard smell. Positioning the car’s bumper right at the edge of the softy pile, we wiggled the stove out moving each corner of the plywood a couple of inches at a time, left right, left right, until the inevitable was about to happen. When the stove tilted, I held it in place while Jack raced to the driver’s seat and pulled the car forward a foot.

Thing came down like gentle snow.

We rocked it onto its feet, covered it with tarps, kissed each other soundly, and piled the soft stuff back into the car so I can wrap it around the furniture and other donations going to the community project.

Neither of us went to the hospital. We didn’t hurt the stove. We are still married we didn’t swear once.

Next up: how do the elderly couple get the stove up four steps into the house? Good question. We’ll figure it out. Or hold a barbecue and invite strong friends.