Saturday Stories: Over The River and Through The Woods

When I was a little girl, there was no question of us travelling to my grandparents' house for Christmas.  Even when my father was overseas during the Vietnam War, Mom packed me in the car and headed from Massachusetts over to New York to her parents' house.  The weather hardly ever made for an easy trip.



Dad and Mom sang songs to help make the miles seem shorter.  Dad has always had a knack for making up verses to songs and for remembering just about every silly camp song he has ever sung.  Combine those two talents and you have the makings for some very entertaining lyrics.  On top of that, Mom and Dad were big Peter, Paul and Mary fans, so I grew up with "Old Stewball was a Race Horse," "Leavin' on a Jet Plane," and "Oh, I wish I were a little can of paint" sung mile after mile.  Mom sang harmony to Dad's melody.



One year, I must have been about seven, Mom and I traveled alone once more.  We had our German Shepherd, Susie, in the way back of our station wagon, too.  There was a lot of snow as usual in New York winters.  We were driving down the thruway when a big semi cut us off.  Mom lost control of the car for a bit and we ended up in the ditch.  Neither of us or our dog were hurt and we were able to get back on the road again without any trouble.  Mom had spent a lot of summers working as a waitress in a thruway restaurant and had often overheard truckers bragging about causing accidents for smaller cars.  Forever after our experience in the ditch, she was positive that the semi had put us there on purpose.   I was too young to know.



When I was in third grade, we lived in Ohio.  It was the year of a huge blizzard.  We managed to get caught in it driving home after Christmas.  I remember how completely the world was blocked out as we crept along at a snail's pace on the highway.  I was much too young to have realized how tense and nervous my folks were as we drove.  Just as it seemed the storm was going to win and we were going to have to find a place to wait out the snow, we came upon a snow plow.  Dad got right up in back of it and slowly, that big, wonderful truck led us through the worst of it.  We made it safely home, but that was the end of holiday trips for a few years.



By the time I was 15, my grandparents had all moved into retirement homes and it was easier for them to visit us at Christmas time than for us to go there.  The long and sometimes scary trips back to the old stomping grounds of my parents' youth became a thing of the past.