“Serving overseas as a small-town boy from America is intense, stressful and humorous! Enjoy a light-hearted story with me from our last 20 years overseas!” – Matt
What is Your Choice? – Dust, Tar or Paint
Gravel roads are a great invention! Gravel roads are cheaper to build and maintain. In Elkhart County, Indiana, local officials switched one road back to gravel as it was better than having a poorly maintained paved road.
A country singer once twanged, “Sitting in a six-lane, backed up in traffic, horns are honking, Yes, it makes me want to take a back road, it makes me want to take the long way home, and put a little gravel in my travel.” I know my mom would never want to sing that song, as the gravel road near our house growing up was her arch nemesis. Whenever she would have the clothes out drying on the line, somebody would come flying by and send a dust cloud blowing towards her clean, damp, drying clothes.
The road near my boyhood home was eventually switched over to “chip and seal,” which ended the dust clouds. However, on a hot, sunny summer day, the tar would bleed out from between the stones and bubble. Cars would get the tar on the wheel wells and my dad would have to clean it off the car. Kids on bikes would get tar on their shoes. It isn’t easy to clean off.
Overseas, we have different enemies to staying clean looking. Our city apartment building like most, has open court yards throughout it, for ventilation and for a fire escape if needed. We live on the bottom level, so we get a little patio, that serves as my wife’s place to hang up our clothes to dry.
Unfortunately, some have less than neighborly neighbors in the apartments above them. With a blind eye to the damp, clean clothes drying on the bottom of the courtyard, neighbors above have cleaned their dirty windows with water (dripping dirty water onto clothes), as well as shaking out rugs and emptying dust pans. Don’t cross a mother bear with cubs, nor a wife with her laundry all dirty again.
However, the worst was when my wife discovered grey paint on our clothes that were out drying. Grey paint on your underwear isn’t too bad, but on your shirts and slacks is another story. The community chairman had forgotten to notify the neighbors that the apartment building roof would be painted that day.
Living overseas in a congested urban grid work of apartments and streets, I could sing along to picking dust over tar and paint. “I’ve been cooped up, tied down, and about forgotten what a field looks like, full of corn or cotton, if I’m going to hit a traffic jam, well it better be a tractor man, so sick and tired of the interstate system, I need a curve and wide a twisting, dusty path.”
Something similar ever happen to you? Contact me and let me hear your story!
mattsmishaps@gmail.com Matt’s Mishaps, PO BOX 114, Grabill, IN 46741
