Driving

My post today is piggybacking from another blog that I read faithfully..Becky Ryan’s. She asked the question “when and where did you learn to drive”.
   It wasn’t as a 16 year old being taught by my father (although that did come later). It happened one summer when I was visiting my southern relatives. Every year during the first two weeks of July my father took my mother back to Georgia to visit all her family. As I grew up these trips became somewhat boring..visiting all the relatives, playing in the red sand around the farmhouse, catching fireflies. But one summer my cousin Norma taught me to drive. I don’t remember if my parents even knew what we were doing. There was an old private red dirt road which bordered the farm property and Norma and I would ride up and down this short stretch of road for something to do. One day she asked if I wanted to drive. Can you imagine? I must have only been thirteen or so. And the old truck was as standard. But somehow I managed and we had the best time traveling up and down that narrow road like we were traveling transcontinental.




    Then I never drove again until the year I had a boyfriend with a car. (It wasn’t Don). He took me way up on a less traveled road near my hometown and asked me if I wanted to drive. Of course, I bravely said yes. I got in and began traveling down that straight stretch. But I didn’t know that there was a 90 degree turn at the end. If you went straight you hit dirt road and a pretty steep incline. And that’s just what I did. You should have heard my boyfriend holler when he realized that I wasn’t going to make the turn. Needless to say he never let me behind the wheel again..LOL. I looked for a picture of me as a teenager and found this one of Don and I in the boat at Chautauqua Lake.