Incident Report

A girl left her home this morning in a little 97 Geo Metro coup, starting out late to work as usual. You probably do not care to hear this morning's reasons for such tardiness, but she would tell you-- it was her horse, and the snow, and the extra ice on the windshield, and the town trucks who had left a berm in front of her car, Dinah.

She knew she was going too fast. She had just taken water up to her horse's pasture a half mile up the winding dirt road, had driven down way too briskly for a snow-covered surface, and had decided that she needed to slow down as she headed down the steepest part of the hill. She was thinking especially of the very narrow and sharp corner at the bottom, an old railroad trestle. She had only ever met people in the railroad trestle about three times in her life, but of course there was someone passing through at the same moment this morning, when her car was not responding to any of her instructions whatsoever and when the nagging "late" word had settled down into her right foot. She found herself headed straight for the driver's door of a big GMC Dinah-eating truck, a certain crunch inevitable...

It was as if Someone had turned her at the last possible second--Dinah's wheels found sudden traction and speeded up the snowbank on the right side of the road, imbedding her firmly in a snowbank recording over two feet worth of accumulated snow after only grazing the side of the truck. And then there was a man, whom the girl had never met before, coming through the trestle, to stop and pull her out, to chuckle at her bumper sticker, and to give her a friendly wave as she headed off-- no ambulance, no policeman, only some copied insurance information. And if you had looked close, you might have seen two grateful sparkles that clung to the girl's lashes but never quite marked a path down her face. Later this afternoon if you had been watching you might once again have seen her blue eyes fill with wonder as she discovered that her driver's side mirror was completely gone--maybe that is where He put His hand.