Ice

Ice! That was something new to us transplanted desert dwellers. So was snow, of course, but that was something I'd waited and prayed for my whole life. Ice was different.

Not that I disliked it. I actually thought it was really pretty, but it could be disastrous!

One Sunday morning in January, three months after we moved to Snowflake, I was in the bathroom getting ready for church when I heard someone knocking on our front door. When I answered it I found the man who lived in the house directly behind us.

“Sorry to bother you so early in the morning,” he began, “but your sprinklers have been on all night, and they are flooding our house.”

What? I apologized and we went outside to see what was going on. Sure enough, the sprinklers in our back yard had frozen open, spraying water across the yard and onto the roof of the house behind us for hours. It was so cold that the spraying water had frozen, making snow which piled up two feet high and three or four feet wide across our back yard. The fence and the roof of the house behind were hung with ice-cycles at least a foot long, and it was really kind of pretty, but what a mess!

I turned off the sprinklers and Moe started out to see the damage, but slipped on the ice on the back steps and fell flat on his back! Thank goodness he wasn't hurt, but we both knew it was a miracle he hadn't split his head open.

Two weeks later we weren't so lucky. This time it was dad who slipped on the ice. He was walking around outside with the plumber, showing him something, when he stepped on an icy patch and fell. The plumber was afraid dad was badly hurt, but dad got to his feet and assured him everything was OK.

“You'd better go in the house, anyway, Ralph,” the plumber suggested. “I can take care of this by myself.”

So dad walked back into the house and sat down on the front room couch. Mom came in a little later and he told her about falling, but said it wasn't a big deal.

All morning dad sat on the couch, obviously shook up from the fall. By afternoon, mom began to worry. Something just didn't seem right, so she finally called Alan, my doctor brother-in-law who lived across the street from mom and dad.

“Could you come over and take a look at dad when you get home from work?” she asked Alan. “He says he is fine, but he just isn't acting right.”

As soon as Alan saw dad he insisted on driving him to the hospital in Show Low. They took a CAT scan and found that his brain was bleeding. Alan gave dad a Priesthood blessing, then put him on a helicopter and air evacuated him down to Barrow's Neurological Institute in the Valley.

“I'm sorry,” he told me over the phone, “but you need to know that this kind of injury can be fatal.”

As soon as he got to Barrow's, the doctors there took dad in to do another CAT scan. To their amazement, they found that the bleeding had stopped by itself.

“I don't understand,” the surgeon told mom later that night. “Two weeks ago I had a patient twenty years younger with the exact same injury. He died. This kind of bleeding does not stop by itself, and I can't explain what happened. The only thing I can say is that it is a miracle!”

We had to agree, but we knew a little more than the surgeon. We knew that Alan held the power of the Priesthood, which gave him the authority to lay his hands on dad's head and bless him to be healed if it was the Lord's will. What a blessing!