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February 1, 2002

"You may as well admit it, Mel. We're stuck."

My husband's eyes bulged. He slammed Ol' Green into gear and spun the tires a bit.

"We're not stuck! We're just in a temporary bind. She'll break loose here in a minute," he insisted, gunning the truck until the air was thick with gas fumes.

I could have argued that we were stuck until the cows came home, but it wouldn't do any good. I've been through this a hundred times before. May as well save my breath and let him come to that conclusion on his own.

The thing is, if he had listened to me in the first place, we wouldn't be in this pickle. That needed to be said.

"I told you we shouldn't try it with all this rain, but you're always in such an all-fired hurry. Never can resist a shortcut, can you?"

"Now don't you start in," Mel grumbled. "I tell you, we're not stuck. The truck's just flooded."

"We're stuck AND flooded," I muttered, settling in for the long haul.

"It's not like we're goin' anywhur in partic'lar," Mel observed. "Might be a good time to stop and smell the roses."

He broke out a package of cheese crackers, handed me one, and offered me a swig of his Dr. Pepper.

"Jist thank of it as a li'l picnic," he said, smiling.

"A picnic is fried chicken, potato salad and watermelon..."

"Whur's yore 'magination, girl?"

"Well it's obviously not nearly as active as yours. After all, you imagine we're not stuck."

"We're NOT," Mel roared, crunching down on another cracker. "We're just `otherwise detained.'"

"Oh, brother..."

"Fact is, we could git out o' here anytime we want. We could walk back to the house....ain't all that far. So we're not rilly stuck. 'Stuck' is when yore pinned down an' cain't get free no matter what."

"You mean kind of like the time I was helping you work cows and that wild heifer trapped you in the headchute instead of the other way around?"

The corners of Mel’s mouth turned down. “Now that ain’t the way it wuz at’all...I thank you been sniffin’ too many gas fumes.

“You know, I’m rilly disappointed in you,” Mel continued. “I always thought you wuz a woman with a true pioneer spirit. Here you are complainin’ over a li’l obstacle that don’t ’mount to a hill o’ beans. Jist imagine fer a minute if we wuz among th’ early settlers an’ this here wuz a wagon...”

“Should I imagine that the cavalry comes to the rescue or do the buzzards get us?”

“You’re plumb cynical. I never thought you’d let a minor li’l inconvenience like this throw you fer a loop. We been down this road before, an’ it’s like I always say, if you don’t lose hope, thangs always seem to have a way o’ workin’ out.”

Sure enough, within minutes a neighbor showed up on his tractor. Mel hooked Ol’ Green to it with a chain an’ the farmer popped us out of the mudhole with one tug.

“See,” Mel said, smugly. “I told you we wuzn’t stuck!”