My wife and I own an outdated farmhouse on a dirt road in the country.
- It’s about twenty miles away from the closest store and grocery shopping can be an event.
It takes all day to go to town and run errands, but last Monday, my wife and I went to town for groceries. We also stopped at the hardware store and the florist. While we were gone for a few hours, I told the boys to load the wood truck. We use wood to heat our home. There is a wood oil furnace in the cellar and HVAC duct that leads to the rooms on the first floor. There is no HVAC duct that leads upstairs, other than a single grate in the floor at the end of the hallway, even with the oil furnace running, it can still be quite freezing upstairs. When I got beach house from running errands, I planned to drive the wood truck to the beach house so we could unload it together. The adolescents thought they would be helpful by driving the truck to the beach house and unloading the wood on their own. One of my sons is 15 and I have been teaching him how to drive. In fact, he has driven the wood truck on several occasions. Most of the time, it has been short fifty yard drives through the fields. My son thought he would be able to safely drive the truck over the tiny wooden creek bridge. When I came beach house that day, I saw the truck resting half in the ditch and half on the bridge. I could not yell at the adolescents, since they were trying to be helpful.