Small Town Living

Miranda Lambert put it the best in a recent hit of hers:

Everybody dies famous in a small town....

WHAT??? No, nobody died, but yesterday a wonderful example of small town-ness was lived out in our house. Aaron was working on a project for school and needed a single white paper plate, I didn't have, well, any, so he hopped in his car to go to Rays for a pack of plates. While he was gone I was cleaning my scrappy place and came across the little book things I had purchased for our retreat coming up and fired off a call to Kris aka. KT about some retreat things, a few minutes later she called me. We discussed the stuff and in getting ready to hang up KT suddenly went,

"Oh! Is Aaron okay?"
"um yeah, I guess so," I say, "why? Okay, so how many of you are asked that question and your heart doesn't just being doubletiming? You get hot and cold all at the same time.

"Well, I just drove by the cement plant and he was standing there with this metal thing in his hand and had some cops on both sides of him."

WHAT????????? haha! "Oh, wow, um," what does one say when they really have a million things going through their mind? What did he do? What happened?

Kris said, "ya it just looked like he either hit something, something fell of his car or someone elses car."

We quickly hung up, I was going to call him but had visions of other things going on that would have prevented his hands from being able to answer his phone so I grabbed my flip flops, my car keys and purse and jumped in my car. No Aaron, ANYWHERE in town that I could see.

I got home, texted him and asked him where he was? Brb, was his reply. I call Kris, telling her I had no idea what had happened but no cops no Aaron were anywhere near Tryons plant.

Aaron walks in while I am on the phone so I get off. He proceeds to tell me this story.

"Mom, (I turn to see him holding this GIANT long piece of plastic in his hand) you won't believe what happened on my way home from the store. (you think?) I was driving along and looked down at my Ipod, to turn it on, and when I looked up I saw this HUGE otter in front of my car, and I hit it!" (an otter? okay, I definitely wanna hear more) Then I heard this loud scraping sound coming from the bottom of my car and pull over up around the corner and pull this huge piece of plastic from underneath the front of it. As I was standing there looking at my car, Abby pulls up and asks me if I need help (Abby is our local cop who all the kids know) and then as we are talking another cop pulls up, pretty soon there are 4 cops looking for the animal I hit. We were down around the corner where I hit the otter and so after looking for it for a few minutes they gave me a ride back up to my car."

Ever exhale so deeply you feel light headed? Ha ha! I love this kid. Here he is a leader on the local basketball team, a presence in his school and he looks at me later and says, "I didn't even know Abby knew my name but when she drove up she asked if I needed help and used my name" "well she should, we replied, she came to all your games and sat by us." "oh, thats how she knew" yep, never once considered that she would have paid attention to someone who played almost every minute of every game. Like I said, I love this kid.

So, the "crisis" averted, he goes on to work on his project and the phone rings. Its his uncle Borp, apparently Grandma had driven by and seen him by the side of the road talking with the four officers and wanted to know if his car was alright. :o) We wouldn't have been surprised to get a whole bunch more calls! It is a story he will get to tell about the giant Otter he hit. Actually, we think it was most likely a Nutria, a strange creature that lives around here in the slough, the swampy type place near the high school, really close to where he hit it, a nutria looks like a cross between a beaver and a rat thing, hideous, nasty awful ugly things that get very very large.

Yes, small town living at its finest and as I said in my beginning line, everybody dies famous in a small town......