Maybe this is why I never get any new blogs out. Always wanting to add something, edit, rewrite, add pictures, etc. Anyway, this is a good example... I wrote this back in February, after our big snow. Just noticed it had been saved as a draft instead of posting... So, here 'tis. A February blog, at the first of summer:
Redneck ingenuity. I wonder if people even consider the 'r' word to be a slander anymore. When I was growing up it was a word for an attitude. A redneck would toss trash from their car window. Sit on their car hoods and yell and whistle when girls drove by. Pen their dogs up in the yard. Dig up mud puddles with their trucks. Drink beer.
About a decade ago I learned that redneck was the new cool. The more Jeff Foxworthy lampooned the term, the more our sons, and daughters, embraced the label.
I've learned that humans are too complex to label neatly, but it was funny that the thought 'redneck ingenuity' popped up the other day. My DH came home after our big, 6" snow here in January and told me he saw a truckload of whoopin' hollerin' young men buying beer at the local convenience store and being pulled on the snow behind a truck in a ...wait for it... bass boat. A flat-bottomed bass boat. My buddies used to pull each other around on an old car hood. The bass boat sounded like fun, too. Use what you have.
It was a pretty good snow for the area, and then we had a hard freeze for a couple of days that turned all that snow into hard, slick ice. They scraped the road, (the chunks have only just melted) but travel was hazardous. Still, three days after the big snow I really needed some things out of storage shed, and that was the first time I ventured up our road. It was a very slick event, that snow and ice.
To my surprise, someone else was also trying to get in to his storage unit.
He had a buddy with him and they believed the trout would be biting that day, and they had a boat to break out of the ice. I walked up - no way I was driving down the drive - onto a small puddle of blue flame. One of the guys pointed at it so I would see it. I took in the five gallon gas can sitting there, and smelled the gas, and slowly it dawned on me that these guys were trying to melt the ice with gasoline or something. I tiptoed past the flaming puddle and made my way, very carefully, down a glazed-over hill that had me skating down the ice to keep my balance.
Mission accomplished, I very carefully walked back up the hill to where one of those two fellows was chipping at the ice with what appeared to be a brand new garden hoe. It was taking quite a bit of effort to chip through the frozen icy snow, but every time he made a breakthrough, a little more flame appeared. Those guys were literally burning tracks down through the driveway, so much did they want to go fishing. Redneck ingenuity.
