an old tale of woe

When my brothers, sister, and I were very young, my mother drove us, in our (my father's, that is) Ford Econoline van, to pick up my father's mother (Edna Aline McCollough Hardin Ford), from wherever it was she was...probably Nashville. I think the story goes that my mother accidentally ran/bumped into some man's vehicle. My mother went in to meet my grandmother, and to find the man whose vehicle she'd hit, and came out to find the van, with me, Jamie, Fred, and Mary rolling backwards down a slope.

My mother ran out, screaming I'm sure, to try to stop the van from its backwards descent, and flung open the driver's-side door, jumping in only to then rip the the door nearly completely from its hinges on a light pole.

The man whose car my mother had hit with the van finally said, "Go, just go," and helped my mother rope the door back on, into some semblance of its normal spot. Who knows what my father said when my mother finally rolled back home to Columbia, Tennessee!