Another true story in response to another post earlier today.Beach Tea Party By: Flatwoods Billy Please make allowances for the time frame which may be wrong, but I think this story happened in the 1960s. Lana and I were active in the Alva Baptist church and it had been decided that the young people were going on a beach trip one Saturday morning. Our contribution was to help to get all the kids to the beach, AND to bring 10 gallons of sweet tea for all to drink. This was decided because we had access to a 10 gallon container which was one of the coolers used by one of the crews in the grove. And Lana did and still does make GREAT ice tea. I went to the barn and got the best one of the coolers which wasn’t in all that good a shape. It had a crack or two in the outer shell and one of the two carrying handles was broken off. The inside shell was intact and that was all that was necessary for this occasion, oh yeah, it had a lid with a handle that went across it, this was important as you’ll soon see. It seems necessary to explain that this was the first generation of the plastic coolers and the cracks don’t seem to happen with the new ones, the plastic coolers were a BIG improvement over the galvanized ones they replaced. We got up early that fateful Saturday morning (we always got up early, I had to be at the barn at 7:00 and the kids had to be ready to go to school) and Ol’ Lana had hit the ground running. She immediately decided that the cooler had to be washed (the INSIDE looked clean to me) so their wasn’t nothing would do til that cooler was washed, outside and inside with soap and water and it was decontaminated with CLOROX. Lana is notorious for using Clorox on stuff. Let me tell ya’ll right now that I had ALREADY shot water on and in that cooler, talk about unnecessary waste of my time (which I figured was a valuable commodity) but none the less, she saw fit to scour the whole cooler. Lana could only make a gallon or two of tea at a time so I set the cooler up on the counter and as she got another gallon of tea made, she’d pour it into the waiting cooler. When she’d put the water on the stove to heat she’d go about packing up what our family (she and I and our two boys) needed. Suddenly she thought about my little Ford Bronco! It probably had two inches of dirt on both the outside and the inside and so, you guessed it, I hadda go out and shoot water onnit and innit so it’d be clean! Reminds me I gotta tell ya’ll about getting ready to go to Disney world in that Bronco! Oh well, that’s another story altogether. Finally the last tea was poured into the water keg and it was ready for me to take outa the house and put it into the waiting (and still dripping) Bronco and she was going to get the two boys and everybody would use the bathroom (I don’t care if you DON’T need to go, you go try anyhow). We were almost ready to go! Lana watched as I picked up that cooler with 10 gallons of sweet tea, I put my right hand under the bottom to support it and got ahold of the handle on the lid with my left hand to steady it. Lana was behind me in the kitchen and I had to take the tea out through the dining room and living room to go out the front door. I was plenty strong enough to tote the tea and so that wasn’t no problem. I turned around and headed into the dining room with the tea, ALL OF A SUDDEN, CRUNCH!!!! The ancient cooler crushed up as the inside shell of the cooler split, this made the whole cooler drop down an inch or two. I immediately tightened my grip on the handle of the lid, but the cooler tipped frontwards and the lid came off the top of the cooler and ten gallons of sweet tea along with the broken cooler fell on the carpet of the dining room/living room combo! It looked like a mock-up of a tsunami as it washed over the rug, it splattered backwards into the kitchen and onto the walls. Lana and I stood there for just a minute as the enormity of the catastrophe spread out before our eyes, I think we both wanted to cry, but Lana was too mad and I was too scared. In a few seconds we reacted by running for all the towels in the house to try to sop up as much of that tea as we could as quick as we could. Lana called the church and told them we weren’t going to go to the beach that day. She said they seemed to understand so we set out to clean up that mess! We worked all that day, sopping, mopping and wiping. At this point it dawned on me HOUSEWORK IS HARD at times. Best I can remember now, the carpet had PERMANENT stains, walls came clean and after repeated moppings and scrubbings of the carpet, it was no longer sticky. Let it be known that I have ALWAYS maintained that I was innocent of ANY wrong doings in this matter, how could I have known that was a faulty cooler? Okay another story about that very same carpet will be written in another episode.
Posted on: Fri, 07 Nov 2014 02:18:08 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015