She jerked. She stuttered. She stopped.<\/p>\n
“Anna Mae! What is it?” I cried, giving her a whack.<\/p>\n
She got going again, just a little ways, then stopped again.<\/p>\n
“Damn it!” A cold day in mid-February, I’m way up the side of the mountain. I came here excited about spending the afternoon to take photos of a wall of icicles. But now I’m stuck\u00a0here with no cell signal.<\/p>\n
I made sure Anna Mae\u00a0was in a safe place, and walked up the lonely gravel road. Walked and walked. Finally got a cell signal and called Tom.<\/p>\n
“Did you get gas this morning?” he asked.<\/p>\n
Ohhhhh…<\/p>\n
The gas gauge is broken on our ’95 Jeep Wrangler<\/a>, aka Anna Mae, and I forgot. It looked like she was still half-full. But with the trip odometer reading 200 miles since the last fill-up, it’s pretty clear what the problem is.<\/p>\n I’m up on a Forest Service Road in the middle of the Chattahoochee National Forest. We’d been up here just the day before, and when I saw the wall of ice I knew I had to come back and take photos before it was gone.<\/p>\n Tom is working, though, it being a weekday. So I came\u00a0alone. And didn’t buy gas.<\/p>\n Tom doesn’t\u00a0yell at me. He doesn’t\u00a0curse me. He doesn’t\u00a0call me an idiot. He doesn’t\u00a0even point out that the gas gauge was not a new problem.<\/p>\n No. He gets\u00a0my exact location, and he goes\u00a0out and buys\u00a0a gas can and fills\u00a0it with gasoline, and drives\u00a0up to where I am. All\u00a0while I enjoyed myself and took pictures of the icicles.<\/p>\n He found me, put the gas in Anna Mae, and made sure she started up OK, and then drove back along the route with me to make sure I got her filled up before the gas ran out again.<\/p>\n In other words, he gave up four hours of his day to go and get gas and bring it to me.<\/p>\n That night, he toasted me with champagne and called me\u00a0his Valentine.<\/p>\n That was in 2011, and it was the 11th time I was his Valentine.<\/p>\n And this weekend it will be the 16th time.<\/p>\n If my tremendous luck holds out, I’ll be his Valentine in 2059, the year I turn 100.<\/p>\n Today’s penny is a 2011, for Feb. 14, 2011. That’s when I took the featured image, above.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" She jerked. She stuttered. She stopped. “Anna Mae! What is it?” I cried, giving her a whack. She got going again, just a little ways, then stopped again. “Damn it!” A cold day in mid-February, I’m way up the side of the mountain. I came here excited about spending the afternoon to take photos of … read more One cold February day<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7011,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[318],"tags":[47,726,500,724,720,215,404,156,725,20,723],"class_list":["post-6986","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-refraction","tag-47","tag-726","tag-forest","tag-gas","tag-ice","tag-jeep","tag-love","tag-photography","tag-sweetheart","tag-tom","tag-valentine"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6986","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6986"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6986\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7013,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6986\/revisions\/7013"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7011"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6986"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6986"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lisaschnellinger.com\/pennies\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6986"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}