Different Kind of Snow Angel
At times I kept an actual list. It came in very handy, and I would often get it out and look at it to remind me that there were still people who cared in the world. Sometimes absolute strangers wound up on this list, and I would pray that they would somehow be rewarded someday. Today my angel list is no longer a physical one--but I am in the habit of taking note when such people enter my life, whether long term or for a split second.
When I was a kid, the bus stop was right in front of my house. Where my kids are being raised, it is not that way. I know many people who travel a couple of miles to get their kids on the bus everyday. Seems a small thing, right? Well, throw in work and bad weather, and it becomes a hardship just making sure your child gets to and from school. So at times I have given people a ride. When we first moved here, a total stranger walked up to me on the first day of school and asked me to help her out. She lived a mile or so from the bus stop, up the mountain. Her work schedule created a problem, and her daughter had no way of getting home in the afternoons. So I would take a short detour each day and drop the girl at her house.
The road that she lived on was not paved, and it went straight up the mountain, not zig-zagging side to side like they do out west. I don’t remember the month, but I do remember that it was a freak snowstorm--one of those that the people in town are oblivious to, but can wreak havoc out here in the country. We are in a pocket where it can snow terribly, while being dry in town. And that is what happened one day.
My little boy was only about a year old, and he sat in his car seat looking at the snow with wonderment. When the bus arrived, my older boy and the girl hopped in, and the cars slowly made their way onto slippery white roads, homeward in the usual procession--just slower.
By the time we reached her street (using the term loosely), I was nervous. I wanted to deliver her straight to her door, so I ascended the mountain, praying that we would make it ok. At some point it became apparent that we would go no further upward. I apologized and dropped her a couple hundred feet from her home. She said it was ok and she disappeared into the snow.
Now the problem of descending. A three point turn was difficult on a good day out here. One of those conundrums. The only possible out was to back straight down. I am a good driver, but it did not go well. My older son still swears that I announced the words brace for impact! as we slid backwards down the mountain, coming to a stop when our car slammed the roadside, rear end about five feet in the air. We were fortunate. There was a ravine on the other side of the road.
Enter a mountain angel. My husband was miles away, and I knew few people here. The ones I did know, I did not know well. Stuck with my kids, I managed to pull a phone number out of my head, the snow still falling at a good clip.
On the other end, “Hello?”
“Hi Becky. It’s Maryann Austin. I’m off the road and the boys are with me. I don’t know how long it will be before I can get my car out. Can you come get Luke?”
With no hesitation, she answered. “Yes, I’ll be right there.”
And she was. I unbuckled my little one from his car seat and handed him to her. She took him as if he were the child of her sister. And my baby was warm and dry because of a lady who barely knew me. Incidentally, two more mountain angels got my car out of the snow. They were two guys whom I had never seen before and have not seen since. And the girl whom I was driving home…her parents got us Chinese that night, and delivered it to our door. (We are not up the mountain!)
My life is vastly different than it was when I first started keeping my angel list, but it still comes in handy--and it is growing all the time
