It’s been a long summer in Moccasin Creek.  Fall finally showed up, even though winter is officially here and Christmas has passed us by one more time.  The drought is coming to an end and the temperatures are now down into the 60’s at night and high 70’s in the daytime.  We only have to run the air conditioners during the daytime in December.  That’s a relief.  The creek is full again and the leaves are starting to turn.  Seems like seasons come later and later every year. And some are here for just a few days. Nothing is too predictable here.  Why should it be?  It’s the place that time doesn’t pay a lot of attention to.

I was visiting with Biff the other day talking about when we were kids and we actually had a winter season.  He was remembering the time he went to bed one warm winter night and woke up the next morning to see his older cousin, Pip standing in his bedroom door.

“Look outside!” Pip told him.

Biff rolled over to the window and saw everything covered in about a foot of snow.  He didn’t even remember getting out of bed or getting dressed, but somehow he and Ducky made it out the back door with clothes on while Uncle Spider was hollering, “At least eat you a piece of toast!”

Now a snowfall in Moccasin Creek is kind of like Bigfoot- you hear about it, but not too many people have seen it.  The first thing you want to do is find a hill to go down.  They stole Uncle Spider’s cardboard mechanic’s creeper and headed out to the old sunken road bed behind the house.  If a guy could get a good push, he could slide a good 6 or 8 feet down the bank of the old road.  Needless to say, a flattened cardboard box can only last a little while in a Moccasin Creek snow pack before it gets too soggy to carry- after all, the humidity in the winter does drop down to about 90%.

Ducky got to digging around the burn barrel in the back yard and found an old toilet seat that Uncle Spider had propped up against the fence so he would remember to burn it later- after he sorted all the other trash.  They screwed the seat to the lid, turned it upside down and tied it to the bumper of Spider’s Scottsdale work truck.  (Pip knew that he could get Spider to join in just to prove he could drive in the snow without tire chains.)  They spent the next hour or so circling the pasture, trying to see who could stay on the longest.  It’s dang near impossible to sit Indian-style on a commode lid and navigate a 30 mile an hour turn over a pasture terrace, but they held their own.

As they headed for turn number three on the back forty, they slid past the woods and heard a voice hollering,

“Hey! Looky here!”

They brought the snow rig to a stop and saw Pip’s brother, Bubba standing across the fence next to Pip’s old yellow Chevy log truck that they had retired on the bank of the pond.  It was the old truck that Pip drove to school one day and they made him park it behind the Ag shop so nobody could see it, so I figure that’s why he dumped it in the woods when he was through with it.

“Y’all come get this ol’ pickup hood!” Bubba hollered.

If you’ve ever seen the hood of an early 50’s model Chevy truck, you know that it strongly resembles the front end of an aluminum fishing boat.  You turn it upside down and you got a great snow sled.  And when you get Bubba and Pip involved in a project, things will get very interesting!

They got the new sled tied to the pickup with a 50 foot ranch rope.  Bubba ran another rope through a scrap of PVC pipe and made a ski rope handle for the front of the hood so they could stand up in it. The pasture sledding era of the Davis Ranch had begun.

With Spider at the helm, that old truck hood carried all the cousins for miles and miles over the once great cotton field.  Everybody within hollering distance came for a spin.  The route was made from sun up till sun down for the next several days and eventually, the snow was gone and all the cousins went home.  Biff and Ducky kept the rig handy just in case another snow came, but it never did.

When spring came, the boys got to thinking how they shouldn’t be deprived of such a luxury just because of a lack of snow, and so they hitched ‘er up one more time.  They were both just learning to drive Spider’s old 69 model F100, so while Spider was at work, and with a soft blanket of fresh grass and the sun on their faces, they once again took to the cow pasture.  It was a little bumpier than before and they soon learned that you had to sit further back in the sled to keep it from nose diving on you and the hind end bucking like Bodacious in his rodeo days.  Other than that, they were back in the saddle!  However, grass and dirt can be a bit more abrasive than snow and eventually they drug that old hood around so much, they wore a hole in the bottom of it- and now, everything you slide across is coming up into the sled with you!  One thing about the Davis boys, though- they ain’t much on quitting a good thing just because it’s got a little dirt on it.  But as with all good things, this too had to come to an end.

As the sled bounced out across the pasture, (now so scarred and scratched that it looked as if something went bad wrong with a gopher poisoning job) Biff at the wheel and Ducky in the pilot’s seat with a face full of dirt from the hole in the hull, Biff hears the alarm bell from the crow’s nest:

“Cow patty straight ahead!!”

He switched to evasive maneuver and pulled the truck hard to starboard!  That old green pickup went right and the sled/turning plow went left- headlong into a terrace!  The front of the hood stuck in the ground like a dart and out came Ducky like the burning oil of a medieval catapult!  The ranch rope snaps and hits the back of back window like a bullet and Biff slides to a stop. Dirt and grass rained down on the pile, and like the lone survivor of a plane crash, Ducky slowly crawled out from under the once great truck hood, now in its upright position.  The old hood just sat there like the tired winner of a hard-fought battle, kind of defiant-like; the dirt-polished bare metal top gleamed in the sun, as if to reclaim its glory from long ago in the pulpwood days.  The pasture sledding era had come to an end.

While there are many lessons to be learned in Moccasin Creek, I can think of this one.  Seasons come and go.  Some will be longer than others.  They don’t always come when you think they will, and you may not even notice when they do- but they will come.

The Bible says in Ecclesiastes, “For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven”.

Just like there is a time for hauling hay and a time for feeding it, there is a season for all the activities of your life.  Learn to flow with them and learn to change with them. Don’t try to do things out of season.  Wait for God’s time.  Because if you don’t, you could wind up getting run over by a pickup hood!

It ain’t Heaven, but if you get up on the tailgate of the pickup, and there’s not a lot of leaves on the trees, you can see it from here.

That’s the way me and Biff remember Moccasin Creek- where days are long, years fly by… and time stands still.