Simple Courtesy

Dirt roads were part of my childhood. We had a dirt road 50 feet in front of my house and it ran for about 12 miles before pavement began. It had its curves and ditches, little and big potholes, and gravel and sand.

It never bothered me, but during the summer I can remember how dusty it was. The tall giant hedges in our front yard would be covered with dust and our front porch would be the same. I can never remember the inside of the house being dusty but I’m sure my Mom and sisters worked constantly at keeping it that way. During the spring and fall the rains would come and small potholes would turn into small valleys. It wasn’t unusual to see a truck try to go through a mud puddle that covered the entire road and getting stuck. It was funny that I always noticed it was people from Memphis that were going to the fish camps that this happened to.

I remember one time in particular that a guy from Memphis got stuck in a mud puddle near our house. He came to our house and instead of asking for help, he basically demanded we pull his vehicle out. My brother who has a temper got on a tractor and went to extract the vehicle. He told the guy it would be $5.00 to get him out of the mud puddle. The guy started going off on my brother about how we dug the hole to get vehicles stuck and make money off of it. My brother said fine and drove the tractor back home. He told me later if the guy had just asked for help he would had pulled the vehicle out for nothing, but the guy had a bad attitude and he decided to charge him. The guy finally got a neighbor to get his vehicle out, but not before the neighbor called us saying the guy was talking us down and what did we think. We said go ahead if he wanted to, so he did and charged the guy $10.00.

I don't know if that guy every learned or not, but you don’t go into someone’s front yard and start making demands, especially when you need something.

Simple courtesy goes a long way.

Added: I saw I misspelled courtesy as curtsey. My spelling is so bad that after finding out about the spelling mistake, I couldn't find it in the dictionary. A friend finally spelled it right for me and thanks. I would have been looking for it for days until I finally stumbled over it. :)