Morning Thanks--for my grandson

When my wife was a lass and the two of us took a shining to each other, I never realized how much I had to learn about life in farm country, even though I'd lived in the area, sort of--as much as any college student ever does--for four years. Lessons needed to be learned. My teachers--my in-laws--were insistent, but neither overbearing nor dogmatic.

 

One moral truth my mother-in-law wouldn't let rest, whether or not she was with us in the car--was the danger of corn corners. Sounds somehow like Hee-Haw--"corn corners." The lessons came as a single directive: "Watch out for corn corners."

So effectively did she drill that warning into her only son-in-law that I never, ever forgot it. Even today I hear her voice whenever I come up on gravel road corners where you can't see what's coming from the other direction. 

For the unlettered, a "corn corner" is an intersection where whoever's working the land sews his hybrids right up to the intersection, tall corn, of course--this is "the tall corn state," after all--so tall it obscures vision. "Watch out for corn corners" means when you come up to one, don't just roar through. You may not have to stop, but slow the heck down because, well, just think about it.

She didn't let up on that one, because once upon a time not that many years before, a kid from next door, home on leave as I remember, went flying through a corn corner at the same moment someone else came flying through in the opposite direction. The neighbor kid was killed in an accident my in-laws' ears witnessed. It happened that close.

"Watch out for corn corners" wasn't a warning that rose from paranoia. She and Dad knew the bloody danger first hand.

It's January. The corner where my grandson had an accident last week had no corn, but he was on a rise right before the intersection, and the guy whose he hit was pitching along on the other side of a farmstead right smack dab on the corner, a lot with a handful of ash trees that meant both drivers were pretty much blind to each other. Pieter broadsided the livestock trailer the other guy was pulling.

The thing about corn corners--or any country corner where your vision is obscured--is that you could spend a day or two going back and forth through the intersection and not meet anyone on the other side. There's no stop sign because meeting someone going the other direction is not impossible but unlikely--corn corner intersections simply don't bear much traffic. Thus, no stop sign.

Sadly, dangerously, this time the two of them were on, as they say, a collision course. Neither of them slowed to a crawl. My grandson was coming to the right of the other guy, so the other guy was at fault, but fault is a scary word because it could have been a much heavier load. Our grandson came off that corner with a concussion that still has him a little groggy, but nothing else. 

We're guessing the air bag knocked him silly but saved his life. If he hadn't been seat-belted in, if he hadn't suffered the wrath of that blessed air bag. . .well, I don't like to think about hypotheticals. Just look at the picture on top of the page.

So I'm thankful this morning, as I've been every morning since the accident, thankful for an air bag and, far more grandly, for the life that airbag saved, and thankful to the Creator of heaven and earth for his favor in allowing us to continue to love our grandson, to simply have him around. 

Sunday he's coming over for dinner with his family--and a girlfriend. I can't believe it yet--that he made it out of that wreck AND that he has a girlfriend. Consider me royally thankful for all of that and always a whole lot more.