…can you solve it?
The following is an edited excerpt from a letter I wrote to a friend. It is about the incident with our golfcart a few weeks ago:
It was a peaceful Sunday afternoon and I had sat down to write my letter when suddenly…
“…
Grace came running into the house yelling so hysterically that I could barely understand her. I got something like, “Need fire extinguisher!!!!” “Hurry find it!” “Golfcart…fire!” “Daddy…” With Grace who is overly dramatic in any situation, Big or Small, it is hard to really know what is going on. LOL! But I hurried anyway. We finally found the fire extinguisher (you would think we’d know where it was, but no…we had to hunt.) and I ran out and took the truck down to where they were on the property. Momma was gone to the store and I left the boys (who were all sick) up at the house with Grace watching a Zorro. Noah (also sick), who had been woken up in the commotion, ran down in his socks with one of the extinguishers and I followed in the truck. Apparently what happened was that Grace and Ethan had been taking turns driving around in the golfcart when it started smoking a little. So they had gone and gotten Daddy up at the house and he went back down with them to check it out. He lifted up the seat to look at the batteries. They (Grace and Ethan) had said it smoked when they pressed down on the accelerator. So Daddy turned the key on, barely pushed down on the accelerator pedal with the seat up and then suddenly the golfcart took off at full-speed! The accelerator wasn’t being pushed down anymore and Daddy chased after it and yanked to turn the key off (which didn’t seem do anything-the golfcart kept going). Daddy was hopping on one foot trying to slam on the break, but eventually he was knocked to the ground and lost one shoe (I’m just thankful he didn’t get run over). Sometime in all that commotion, the seat was ripped off as well. So, the golfcart zoomed on at full-speed across the driveway, slammed into some unused electric fencing, knocked over a post and ran into a ditch. One of the wires was caught on the golfcart and kept it from going any further. Daddy said it kept whamming against the fence trying to get up the hill. Kind of funny to think about now, but it wasn’t at the time. It was like someone was pushing the pedal down all the way, but nobody was! It was out of control and we felt like we needed a remote control or something. LOL! Anyways, back to the story. Eventually, because it (the golfcart) had met resistence, it just caught on fire. Must have short-circuited or something of that sort. It was at this point that Grace had come running up to the house for help. Thankfully, the extinguisher was successful in putting out the fire (the stuff that sprays out stinks!). As we were talking about it afterwards, we saw how God was watching over our family the whole time! Nobody was hurt and by having the golfcart run into the wires, it stopped it from going on into the neighbors woods. Can you imagine, an out of control golfcart, on fire, bashing through the woods? LOL! It probably then, would have crashed into a tree which would have torn the front of it all up. But when it ran into the wire it didn’t do any damage to the front. Can’t you see how God was in control? Noah said it would have been awful if it had run into his electric netting, through all his chickens and geese, back out the other side and then bashed into his bee hives! Imagine us trying to put out the fire with mad bees all swarming around. LOL! Yes, it could have been much worse.”
This particular fire was a small one involving only a part or two. So we were just planning on having to replace those parts and be done. With all our sickness and such over the past few weeks though, we hadn’t had a chance to move the golfcart up to the barn under shelter to work on it. So it just sat on the side of our driveway (we had managed to roll it out of the ditch). Well, that was our exciting and adventurous golfcart story of the year, or so we thought…little did we know that it was not the end but just the beginning of the “adventure” if that’s what you want to call it. “Destruction” is more like it! The second part of our story came yesterday evening…
…It was one of those days where you just wanted to stay curled up in the bed, reading a book or letting the sound of the rain on the roof lull you back to sleep. Drizzly and dark outside where just looking out the window at the gloomy wetness made you shiver all over. Not to say it was really cold out, just looked it. It tempted you to grab a shawl and wrap around yourself. So, my point is, it was a rainy day. There, now I can get on with the story. LOL! Daddy had just gotten home from work and Noah and I were saying hello to him. Then he asked us if we’d seen the golfcart. “No.” we replied, “Is it missing?” Daddy said, “Well, as I was coming up the driveway, I got a glance at the golfcart and it just didn’t look the same. Something was different about it.” So he backed up to get a better look with the headlights shining on it. The first thing Daddy saw was that all the tires were gone! Our thoughts were, “Did someone steal them?” But that would have been the less likely case because that the golfcart was not visible from the road. Plus, the rims were still on, and it would have been strange for someone to just take the tires. It would have been easier just to haul off the whole thing! But as Daddy got out and took a closer look, he found that the tires were actually still there, just in a different form – smoldering ashes! “What?!” Noah and I both exclaimed. Daddy was like, “I looked to me like the whole thing burned!” I still couldn’t grasp in my mind what in the world could have happened. Bekah had gone down and gotten the mail at 2:30pm that afternoon and remembers the golfcart looking the same as always. Everyone’s curiosity was aroused now, so the whole fam piled in the truck and went down in the dark with it still drizzly, to check on our beloved golfcart! We still don’t know what happened. It was a sight! None of us, I don’t think, would have recognized it as being “our” golfcart without knowing so it the first place. The ashes from the tires were still glowing and anything plastic on the golfcart was GONE! Not just melted, vaporized. No steering wheel, no roof, no seat, no front, no tires, no cubby’s or anything contained in them, no cupholders etc… So sometime between when Bekah got the mail at 2:30pm and when Daddy got home at 6:00pm, our golfcart burnt up. Did the rain have something to do with it? Short-circuit it again? If so, why did it happen after it had been raining for hours? Even if we had wanted to burn up our golfcart, I don’t know that we would have known how! How do you catch heavy duty tires on fire so that in several hours they are just smoldering coals? It had to have been an extremely hot fire to just vaporize things, as well. The roof, gone? Not melted, gone. Was it an explosion? Even if the batteries had caught fire, how did they burn up the front, back, roof and tires? We’re just so thankful that the ground was saturated, otherwise the nearby woods would have caught fire! Looking back it was God’s mercy that we weren’t around or that the golfcart wasn’t brought up to the house yet. We wouldn’t have known what to do. But personally, I think it would have been the coolest picture to capture of our golfcart-a ball of fire (if that is what even happened). As you can see, we are full of questions with no answers. Our chickens and geese are the only ones who do know. Their pen is across the driveway from where the golfcart was sitting and so they got to see the whole show. If only they could tell us…
If anyone out there has any idea what might have been the reason for our perfectly fine, only slightly burnt and crazy golfcart to almost disintegrate in only a few hours, we would love to know! Our guess is that the golfcart had had enough of the Sanders Family and hurriedly pushed its self-destruct button before we could do anything else to it.
Click
here for “before” pictures of our golfcart.
Checking it out.
Pretty bad.
No steering wheel.
Still VERY hot!!
Takin’ in the sight.
Glowing rubber ashes.
It really stunk.
Riding back up to the house in the back.
This morning Noah and I went down to see it in the daylight.
Kind of antique lookin’.
Looks so different.
Noah says, “We no longer give any advice on fixin’ golf carts. Anybody who recently received information please disregard anything I said if you don’t want your golf cart vaporized. (Specifically Edgar).”
View on the other side.
It’s not rolling anywhere.
Looks kind of like a bombed out vehicle.
The Witnesses.
“Healthy” experiment version of pumpkin pie. No refined sugar or white flour and used coconut oil instead of crisco, etc.. Didn’t turn out too bad!
Grammy and Eman are puzzle buddies. I think Grammy was working on her gorgeous cross-stitch project which is all the Promises of God. Isn’t that neat?
Kitchen discussions.
Supper coming out of the oven.
Big brother wrestlin’ time.
Nehemiah: “I got you!”
Lunar Eclipse.
Here is how we found the boys one evening after Daddy finished family devotions.
Looks like ya’ll had fun! Miss you!!!