The second day of December, early in the morning, the snow begins to fall, quickly dressing Poplar Street, and the cars lined up along it, in their winter attire. I sit in the rocker beside my bedroom window watching and praying disjointedly while sipping my morning decaf, too tired to open my Bible and read.
My husband slips out of the house before the children awake, guiding his car through the treacherous downfall to spend his day hunting alone on the slippery slopes of an unfamiliar mountain.
I sit until I hear the twins talking in their room and then go to them. “Come, look out the window!” I say. While I commence with our morning routine of dressing and hair combing, straightening rooms and caring for the baby, my two busy toddlers stand still side-by-side, steaming and smudging the upstairs windows. While preparing to change the baby, I dial the pediatric call center to cancel her appointment. Yes, my husband just left to travel nearly an hour up into the mountains voluntarily. No, I am not loading my three children in the van and driving four minutes to the doctor’s office. They re-schedule her for late January. Momentarily I think about the few vaccines I had decided to start for my baby, and wonder whether her risk of contracting pertussis or acquiring accident-caused injuries from the snow-storm is higher… I am pretty sure I know the answer, but it still troubles me that there are always risks for my children–risks of illness, or accidents, side-effects, or, yes, risks of losing their daddy in a winter storm…
We bundle up after breakfast, and the toddlers bumble around in the white wonderland where our drab town backyard once was. “Mom,” one of them says soon, “I’m cold, I want to go inside.” We unbundle on the back porch, and return inside where I resist their subsequent urges to try out the cold again. I go through the routines of our day–lunch, nap-time, snack-time–relaxing slightly whenever I hear from my husband and know he has not yet slid down a cliff or fallen into a waterfall. But when I realize that the transformed city-scape out of my window has fallen into early winter darkness lit by street-lights and incandescent Christmas bulbs, and I have heard nothing from my husband for quite a few hours, I begin to worry.
I try several times before he answers my call. “I have maybe half an hour more till I get back down the mountain,” he says. “It might be 6 or later till I get back to my car. I’ll send you a pin for my location. I won’t have service coming down the mountain. Don’t call out the troops till at least 7.”
“I thought you were going to get out of there before dark?” I say.
“That was the plan, but I was tracking a really big buck.”
The rest of his explanation rolls off the top of my head, as I picture myself a widow with three small children, their daddy killed or paralyzed because of a big and elusive buck that lives somewhere on the slippery slopes in rural Pennsylvania.
“Be careful,” I say.
“I will be.” Confidently.
I make supper and wait to hear from him. Always before I have eventually heard from him. The children set out plastic food on a blanket for a picnic. I lug Baby Caroline along absentmindedly and feed her when she gets fussy, unable to remember when she last ate. The clock nears 6:30 and creeps past, and even though I know I should be feeding my children something other than plastic food, they are still playing happily and I am staring at my phone, at a message that still has not gone through. Every few minutes I try to call him. It is well over an hour since he told me he had half an hour out. Does the area he is in have cell service nearby? I google, and I watch. Twenty minutes from the time I know I will need to call his dad and tell him his son is lost in the mountains, I see the message go through. I hit the call button again. He answers. At the sound of his voice, I know I can get my children supper and even eat myself, because I am not a widow yet.
“Wow, you tried calling me a lot of times,” he comments, later that evening, as he looks at his cell-phone. He has safely traversed the slippery roads home and is again sitting under our roof.
The next morning the doctor’s office calls. “No way, Hosea!” the receptionist says, telling me she will not put up with the call center scheduling my baby way out in January. So I dig out the car and pack my children in, creeping through the maze of garbage truck and school-bus out late on our street the day after the first big snow. I worry again about those vaccines–to vax or not to vax with holiday gatherings looming near and a little baby with a cold today… This issue fraught with controversy is casting doubts on my decisions that seem so easy when I do not have a tiny beautiful human dependent on me for well-being.
Decisions behind us, after the doctor’s visit with three littles in tow, I drive past houses and bushes and restrained city trees, all snow-capped and glistening. On the radio, the lady announcer exclaims about the tiny baby born 2,000 years ago.
“Who was the baby?” I ask the children, glancing back at my own three babies protected in carseats.
“Jesus!” Ellie says.
“Yes, Jesus was a tiny baby when He was born, and He was God!” I say.
“And he died on the cross!” Ellie exclaims.
“And then what?” I ask.
“He’s alive!”
“Yes, he came alive again!” I say, reaching past my own stress and angst to grasp the answers for my children. I need to tell them what I know, even when I can’t feel it, so maybe they can learn to feel it. “Jesus came alive, and now even people that die can come alive again! That’s why we don’t need to worry or be afraid of anything, because Jesus can heal anything if we let him.”
“Even heal Daddy from where he fell on the rocks!” Ellie says, referring to another mountain adventure, an injury long since as good as new.
I wonder as I drive along, when I will be able to live these truths that I teach my children? To act out in moments of stress the words of the verse that were whispering to me the day before when I sat and waited for a text message to go through: “Don’t worry about anything; instead, pray about everything. Tell God what you need, and thank him for all he has done.” (Philippians 4:6)
“Silver bells,” the radio sings as I slow down for a red-light on River Street. “Silver bells… It’s Christmas-time in the city…”
