The farther we drove, the more obvious it became that it was getting colder. Pretty much all of North Georgia was under cloud cover, and we saw more snow flurries the closer we got to Atlanta. Josh and I had driven in plenty of snow in Tacoma and in DC, so Harper and I continued to follow the U-Haul behind his truck. We cautiously made it through Atlanta on I-85 south, but as we continued, road conditions were changing rapidly. The cars around us were slowing down significantly. As we slowed, I could see drivers in front of me tap their brakes, but their tires would continue to spin without gripping the ground. A dry patch of road would be their saving grace, and the car would continue to coast down the highway. Then, cars began appearing in ditches. Not wrecked, but after losing grip on the road, they found their stop in the grass. First there were two or three cars, then in another half mile there would be six or seven. These cars were populating the areas around the short bridges built over ditches and small creeks. I became white knuckled and afraid to look out my window at the people who had crashed. I was just staring at the back of the U-Haul trailer in front of me, praying that we would stay on course.
We crossed a bridge that had a small drop-off at the end. Suddenly, the U-Haul dipped with the edge of the bridge, and with the downward momentum, it began to fishtail out of control in front of me. The truck with my husband inside and the U-Haul zoomed off the left side of the interstate into the median. Josh spun around one, two, three times, the trailer leaning more and more each rotation. As he entered the fourth spin, I screamed, “Please Jesus, no!” as every tire on the left side of the truck and the U-Haul were suspended off the ground. After what seemed like hours but was only seconds, the truck and trailer slammed back down on the ground with a violent bounce. The incident definitely caused the biggest scene out of any of the sidelined vehicles we’d come across so far. At some point I had safely pulled my own car over. I got out and sprinted to Josh’s truck, leaving baby Harper in the car. The left back tire of the truck had been completely ripped off the wheel. I opened his door to find him buckled in and (thank God) unharmed. Everything else was all over the cab of the truck: the sunflower seeds he’d been chewing, the bags that had been in the back seat, and all his paperwork. Oddly enough, Josh was actually angry. He was so upset that he had wrecked his car, which is not how I saw it. I was just so thankful that he was okay and Harper was not with him. We hugged in the muddy snow and said a quick prayer thanking God for no bodily harm. Now everyone in the median was asking the same question: How are we going to get home? People began walking and abandoning their cars. It was an apocalyptic sight for farmland Georgia. We called a tow truck and waited for a good forty-five minutes before they got there. They slowly towed our truck to a tire shop in the middle of nowhere that looked like they probably worked on tires during the day and made white lightning at night. However, the people were super nice and very accommodating to us as we waited. They fixed Josh’s tire and sent us on our way to Auburn.
It took us an hour and a half to drive twenty-five miles. We eventually made it to our little condo just outside of Auburn, where, much to our surprise, there were about twenty people from the community waiting to help us unload our things. Despite the weather, Kate Larkin, the new friend we’d made on our tour of Auburn, had enlisted help for us to get our things out of the U-Haul. These people unloaded our washer and dryer and hooked it up, put things in cabinets, got the baby stuff out and ready to use, and put our furniture together in about half an hour. We thanked everyone, ordered pizza, put Harper in bed, and just sat on our couch thinking about our new life. We are civilians now. We live here now. We are done with being stationed, assigned, and attached to posts. Harper has a hometown!
PART FOUR
HAPPILY OUT OF CONTROL
CHAPTER SIXTEENA TEST
Not that I have already obtained all this, or have already arrived at my goal, but I press on to take hold of that for which Christ Jesus took hold of me.
—Philippians 3:12
PAIGE
Josh and I had just entered our fourth year of marriage when we left the hospital and moved to Alabama. Even though we had overcome so many obstacles, we still had not marked some basic milestones of a couple in their mid-twenties. I had never had a full-time job since we’d been married. Harper was now five months old but had never been around another baby. Josh was receiving a retirement check from one job but didn’t qualify for entry-level jobs. In an attempt to join the mainstream, I immediately started looking for work. I had heard about a
