Years ago in North Carolina. My mom, sister and I had gone to the old family farm to scatter my grandmother's ashes and as we were turning left into the farm road, a guy in a pickup truck decided to pass the truck that was behind us (on a curve and double yellow line, of course) and hit us just rear of broadside. Our car was spun around three times, went down and up a ditch and ended up almost hitting the house my mother was born in.....in fact we came to rest almost touching the wall of the room she was born in.
The car was totaled, my mom was shook up, my sister had cuts on her head from the rear window breaking and I hit the door frame with my face. Compression fracture of the cheekbone and neck and back banged up. My first ambulance ride. They actually used the siren.....I loved it. Small town hospital; I'm asking them to give me my purse so I can get out my insurance card and they insist that "we'll worry about that later, dear". In the big hospitals, it's "can you just stop bleeding long enough to give us your insurance card???"
The strangely endearing part: in a small town, word gets out fast. I'm on my back in the emergency room, strapped into a body board while they try to find out where the radiologist has gone for lunch, and a succession of old ladies file in, lean over me and say, "Now dear, you won't remember me but I'm your grandfather's second cousin on his mother's side." The next one would say, "Now, dear, you haven't seen me since you were two years old but my first husband was your grandfather's cousin." And so on.
When we were all released later in the day, a whole bunch of them were still out there in the waiting room, arguing over whose house we were going to for dinner and whose house we were going stay at until we "recovered". We were the big story in the weekly newspaper later that week.
Any wonder why I love small-town North Carolina?
