Watson was in PA and Julia and I were on the farm by ourselves.
Now, when I was a kid on the farm, it was drummed (and I mean drummed) into my head, that if you open a gate, you go through, and you SHUT it behind you.
Watson, who grew up in a logging family, was brought up more like, leave the gate open so it’s not such a pain in the butt for the next person to get through. I get that, because when you’re in a big piece of equipment, it’s a major pain to stop it, climb down, open the gate, climb back up, drive through, climb back down, etc etc. : )
Anyway, after things had quieted down in the evening, Julia and I decided we should take her new (to her) car for a drive, so we went to check and see if all the gates were shut (because neither of us felt like getting up and chasing cows in the morning). Julia was excited about her car (of course) and was telling me all about it and how I wasn’t allowed to eat in it, and how I had to make sure I was clean before I got in and how she didn’t want any dogs in it, and really wasn’t interested in the outside of it getting dirty, either. It was going to be the most babied car on the planet.
So, yeah, we get to Summer Hill Road and both sets of double gates on our pasture had been left wide open.
So, Julia sits in her car while I jump out and close them. Now, if you’ve never closed double gates, I’ll try to explain…
You get one gate, take it up to where it closes, and if it won’t stay there, you swing it up, so that it slowly drifts back while you run to grab the other gate and run it closed before the first gate swings back open again.
Now, it takes a bit of a knack to get it just right and every set of double gates are a little different. I hadn’t done those for a while, and I didn’t swing the first gate up enough, because by the time I got the second gate up, the first gate had swung back open and I had to run to get it after swinging the second gate up. I finally get both gates together and wrap the chain around them.
When I get in the car, Julia is laughing at me because I was running between the gates like a newbie and not like a seasoned farmer who’d closed them a million times and had my swing perfected.
We stop at the second set of gates. I jump out again, determined that I’m not going to be bested by THIS set of gates, and I grab the first one, giving it a super hard swing.
So, um, this one swings just a little easier than the first one and it swings past the spot where it should stop, and keeps going…all the way open on the other side until…it bounces against the bumper of Julia’s (new to her) car with a loud bang.
Oops.
So, yeah, I saw that coming about a quarter of a second before it actually hit, and I’m grimacing and kind of tiptoeing forward like Julia might not have seen/heard it and I can grab the gate and hope that it didn’t ding her car. Thankfully as I creep up, I can see in her car and she’s laughing. She knew I didn’t do it on purpose, and there wasn’t enough time for me to grab the gate, let alone for her to put her car in reverse and avoid it, so I get the gate, careful to NOT hit her car again, chain them shut and she and I use our phone lights to look at her car’s bumper.
There isn’t a scratch on it, thankfully.
Haha. Thanks so much for spending time with me this week!
Hugs and love,
~Jessie 🌸