Dragging my marriage through the mud

"Are you listening to me," my husband asked (for the fifth time). I nodded as I held the mud-encrusted tow chain as far away from me as possible, my dainty, pinkie-drinking-tea fingers shaking with the effort. He sighed, trying to re-focus my attention away from my cold, wet and dirty hands. "I'm muddy too," he said. I looked at him. His Carhartt suit, once an attractive shade of deer-hide brown, was glimmering with several layers of heavy-with-winter-weight mud. I decided to keep my complaints to myself (for the time being).

With an onslaught of relentless February rain, my driveway mutated into a van-enveloping mud-pit. I arrived home to a vehicle tilted alarmingly at a gravity-defying angle, trapped between two trees on our little hill. "Are you listening to me," Brad asked again. Yes. I understood the plan but was trying to piece together how it had shifted so drastically. When Brad had initially called, he explained how he would be manning the Titan while I sat, placidly and pretty, in the entrenched van...my only job would be to make sure the tires were pointed in the correct direction. When did I become the tow truck driver? Apparently, my husband was worried about my safety in the precariously parked van.

"Okay," he said, after slithering underneath the vehicle and securing the tow chain, "when I give you the signal, proceed forward slowly...SLOWLY...SLOW-LY." I nodded, noticing mud drying underneath my nails. "And," he continued, "when I say stop...stop." Uh-huh. Was that a mud splatter stain on my coat?


So it began. We successfully shifted the front end of the van from between the trees. One step forward. The back-end slide alarmingly back down the hill. Two steps back. "Hang on! HANG ON!" Brad yelled. I put Titan in park and leaned out the window screaming, "S-T-O-P...you said you were going to say STOP!" After an hour's worth of emergency marriage counselling, we tried another approach. Fresh from a unit on 4th grade angles, I examined the position of the van and the surrounding trees and suggested, "Why not let gravity do the work for us and just take it the rest of the way down the hill and Titan can pull the van out of the field?" Always open and accepting of others, Brad considered my plan as we embarked in another hour's worth of counseling before trying my idea.

"Go down the hill so you can tell me if I'm getting too close to any of the trees," Brad said, climbing back into the van. So much for him caring about my safety, I thought as I stood, clearly in the path of a woman-crushing vehicle. "What are you doing," he yelled out the window. "You told me to watch down here," I responded in a patient and loving manner. "Stand BEHIND a tree so you won't get hit, honey (He actually used another word that I'm sure, in his heart, was synonymous with "honey."). With precision driving and the grace of God, Brad managed to maneuver the van through a maze of evergreens to the field.

We (Brad) re-hooked up the tow-chain and rolled, un-hindered from the field. The next obstacle was the three-foot snow-packed barrier at the end of our seasonal-use road. "Start your turn," Brad yelled. Without hesitation, I followed his direction even though my vast background with 4th grade angles told me that I wouldn't make it. One more round of emotion-cleansing therapy before Brad systematically backed up and surged forward until he hit that wall like a bull, busting through. We did it! Both the van and the marriage survived!