It is not always good to share horrific experiences. I made the mistake of sharing my lawnmower experience with my husband and Charles, my brother-in-love.

I had just purchased a new riding mower. I did not quite understand how to operate it properly but, in spite of that, I decided to drive it down the hill. There are several curves and steep places on the driveway. When I drove to the second steep hill and curve, the motor began to race, and I did not realize that I had the throttle in the wrong place.

The mower sounded like it was going to take off up in the air. It was moving, and it seemed like it was going faster than it actually was. With great fear building up inside, I made the stupid decision of jumping off. The minute I hit the concrete driveway, I just knew my foot was broken.

I had no phone and no way of getting back up the hill to the house. I realized that, before the pain caught up with my brain, I had to do something.

The lawnmower had kept going. I walked down the hill on my broken foot and there, in the ditch, was the mower. I managed to get on it, and when I turned the key it started right up and pulled both of us out of the ditch like we were friends. I returned to the house, put my foot in a tub of water with ice, and got on the phone with my friend Laney to ask her to send John to take me to the hospital because I had broken my foot.

She said, “Willie Mae, how do you know that it is broken?”

I said because my foot is bent to the wrong side.

She said, “Oh, well I guess it must be broken. John is on his way.”

I got to the hospital in good time. The swelling had not started yet, so I was able to have surgery that very day for the four bones broken in my right foot.

After telling my husband and brother-in-love about that experience, Hardy has a fear of riding down the hill on the mower and Charles refuses to come to visit unless we have an emergency. He says he imagines his car going off into a ditch, and he will not be able to jump out as easily as I was able to jump from the moving lawnmower.

Several weeks ago, my husband got the courage to drive the mower to the bottom of the hill to cut the grass that had grown to look as if we had started a hay farm. He got the mower stuck in the ditch. I always kid him about being scared to drive close to ditches because he does not want to overturn. On this particular day, while alone, he was going to prove me wrong.

He was gone for longer than it should have taken. Just as I was about to go looking for him in the car, Beanie, a pup that we are sitting with, began barking and ran down the road to meet him. He had walked up the hill to get the truck to pull the mower out of the ditch. His pride would not let him call me to come to get him.

He sat on the porch to get his breath for a while as we both laughed about our predicament. Then we got into the truck and headed down the famous hill.

His mind was not on getting the mower out himself; he had his mind on a friend who is a jack of all trades, Brian Dorstart. I said, “No, let us try to get it out before seeking help.” He must have exhausted himself walking home and did not want to hear what I was requesting. Proving his manhood to me was the last thing on his mind.

A truck was coming, and when he heard it his eyes got bright and he headed to the road. By the time I said, “Please don’t stop the truck” he had stepped up and waved the driver down. There were three men in the truck. The driver asked, “What can we do for you, sir?” — at which time he noticed the mower in the ditch.

I said we could have gotten it out with a little more effort. Hardy said since he’d stopped them, let them help. The three men came over and lifted the mower out in seconds.

Now he is ashamed of himself so, to distract, he begins a conversation with the men that he later regretted. He asked them what they were doing and they said “Sir, I am not sure how this happened but you all have unusually narrow roads out in the county. We had put road reflectors on 40 some roads and now we are having to pop them all up.”

My husband looked at me, then said, “Sir, you are going to cause me to have to apologize to my wife. I have been accusing her of driving too close to the center of the road and now you tell me that it is not her driving? The problem is with the roads?”

The truck driver said, “Sir, go ahead and apologize to her.”

Hardy dropped his pride and I heard it hit the ground. He said, “Baby, I am sorry that I pressed you so hard for the last couple of weeks about something that was not your fault. Now we do not have to argue all the way to Cave Spring about your driving and hitting the road reflectors. You see, it was good that I stopped the truck. Now we both know that you are as a good driver as we thought.”

Willie Mae Samuel is a playwright, founder and director of the African American Connection of the Performing Arts Inc. and a 2020 Heart of the Community Award recipient. She can be contacted at artsnow2019@gmail.com.

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