Chapter 10 · America the Beautiful

The Fall

A missed step, a bag of ice, and hundreds more miles still to drive

---

A lot of our time in Beckley was spent with family, visiting various members who lived in town to catch up with them, and a few whose health issues prevented them from coming to the reunion. I especially loved spending time with my Uncle Walter and Aunt Wanda, who also came up from Georgia for the annual reunion. They lived farther south in central Georgia, a good two hours from Atlanta, on a farm. Mom, and possibly even my grandma, had taken us down to their farm a couple of times to visit. It was the first time I remember seeing a cow up close. It was kind of like a petting zoo, but somehow very different.

Uncle Walter was like another grandpa, loving all the kids and always having a jolly smile on his face. We had a good banter of jokes between the two of us that kept us laughing. I remember passing him an unopened can of Coke one time and telling him, “Watch out now, I done stuck my finger in that.” His eyes went wide as he checked his can, then we both started laughing when he realized I’d gotten him. Aunt Wanda was just as sweet as Uncle Walter, laughing along with our antics. She and Grandma would usually sit and visit for most of the reunion before she’d be off tending to the kids, preparing a plate, or helping with cleanup.

The morning after the reunion, Grandma and I packed up the camper and began our journey to Arkansas. Now, we’d done this enough times that we pretty much had it down to a science and could generally get everything packed up and be rolling out of the campsite in a couple of hours.

Not that day.

We were definitely on the right track, packing up our supplies, with me grabbing and putting away most of the outside gear while Grandma handled the cleanup inside the camper. It must have been when she was bringing all of the trash from inside to our outside trash can that she missed a step coming down the narrow camper staircase.

Watching her go down was like watching a tree fall in slow motion, and there was no way I could get to her in time. Like anyone in that situation, she instinctively threw her arm out to brace her fall.

I ran to her side, helping her up and over to the picnic table so she could sit down while we assessed her injuries. Her head was fine. Her legs, back, and neck all seemed okay. It was the arm that caught her fall that was giving her pain.

I grabbed her a bag of ice to lay over her arm while she sat there on the bench to recover her senses. I finished packing up the camper by myself, with her guidance here and there. Grandma is a soldier who gritted her teeth and calmly drove us—and that camper—all the way to Arkansas with her arm in pain.