From Cindy Robinson

The summer I was fourteen, a new boy moved near my Aunt’s house. One Saturday I was in a hurry to go to town to see the new boy. However, my father would not go until he had combined (a combine is a harvesting machine) enough beans to make a truck load. Between my father’s insistence on waiting, my impatience, and our conflict of wills, I got to town, but not exactly like either of us planned.

In those days, ladies still ripped apart the colorfully designed cloth sacks cattle feed was shipped in, washed them, and made dresses out of them. I got ready for town, wearing one of these dresses with buttons down the front. Jeans for girls were forbidden. To hurry things along, I made my father a sandwich and took it and cookies to the field.

I approached the tractor and saw a handy ledge to step on to hoist myself onto the tractor. What I didn’t know was the ledge was the combine’s power take off. The next thing I knew I was on the ground, naked, bleeding, and shocked.

My father heard the motor miss rhythm and turned to witness my dress wrapped around the shaft. According to my father, if I’d had on jeans or a new dress of stiffer fabric, my body would have been "wrapped around the shaft."

The field was close to the road, and I had no clothes on. My father told me to get under the wagon to hide my nudity, went to the house, and told my mother to bring me clothes. Mother was shocked.

Then we went to town! Not to sell a load of beans. Not to see the cute new boy. But to get stitches in one eyebrow where a flying button caught me and a cast for my left ankle.

God and a dress saved my life.

However, as I began becoming my own person, the conflict with Dad’s rules came into focus. They stifled my personality and any spark of creativity.