Day one: 31 stories

I am linking up like last year to do 31 posts on a topic.  This year, my topic is 31 stories.  They will be family stories, written by me mostly but a few guest appearances as well.  They're for my kids who like to read my blog and they're for me because my blog seems like a pretty good permanent storage solution.  As long as the internet survives, it'll be here.

I hope you like them too.

I will begin with a story that is one of my earliest memories.  I was four.

This is us on Easter morning.  I am the one in yellow.

My mom was pregnant with my brother Enoch so there were just the three girls--my older sister Marianne, my younger sister Olivia and me.  My dad had rebuilt a wagon for a parade in Wells, the nearest town to our rural Nevada home.  My dad was the Young Men's president at church and was going to give the teenagers a ride on the new wagon in the parade. (So it was summer, a few months after the above picture was taken.)  He wasn't sure if his team of draft horses, Betty and Billy, were ready to pull a wagon in town with all the noise so we went for a trial run.

My parents sat on the seat with one-year-old Olivia between them.  Marianne and I were in the back of the wagon.  I think we were probably mostly standing up, hanging onto the seat for balance.  Everything was going along fine until we were on our way back home.  We met our uncle Demar heading the other direction.  He was driving a truck with a rumbling diesel engine.  He stopped the truck and visited with us for a few minutes.  When he was ready to drive on, he started his truck and that spooked Betty and Billy.  They started running.

Fast.

One of my parents pushed Olivia on the floor and my dad reached around and shoved us to the floor of the wagon.  The reins cut through my dad's hands as he tried to stop the horses.

They were not stopping.

Finally, my dad climbed out on the tongue of the wagon and was able to get the horses stopped.  From the distance of time and after becoming a mother, I realize how scared my parents must have been with their little family careening down the road behind runaway horses.  I should have been scared too but I don't remember that.

I remembering thinking that we were fine.

My dad was there.

Here are Billy and Betty (and my dad)--a few years later--at a pulling contest at the county fair.  They were good strong horses.  They didn't mean to try to kill us...