The Thanksgiving of 2010 was also tough. For years I'd been making the turkey and most of our traditional dinner, but mom had always been there to visit with while I worked. It didn't seem right to do it alone.
Most of our children came to spend the holiday with us that year. On the following Saturday, Russell and Linnea and their families decided to cut down Christmas trees, and the girls and I went along. We had a great time and finally found some wonderful trees right along the side of the road, way up in the mountains.
After parking, everyone took off looking for perfect trees. It was kind of hard to see clearly with the light shining through the trees and glaring off the new glasses I wearing, and I worried for a while that I would stumble, but I tried to be careful. I found a beautiful tree at the bottom of a little gorge, and was walking around it, looking up, when I suddenly tripped. Even as I was falling I felt like a fool, but I couldn't catch my balance and I face planted right in the snow.
Quickly, I pushed myself up onto my hands and knees, remembering how I'd fallen years ago when we were playing in the snow at the gravel pits. That time I'd skinned my face and looked awful for days , and I was hoping I hadn't done it again. Then I saw blood dripping into the snow.
“Dang!” I groaned. “I hope I didn't break my new glasses.”
Pulling them off, I squinted at them through the dripping blood. Thank goodness, they seemed to be OK.
“What did I trip over?” I wondered as I slowly stood up. There, right in front of me, was a huge boulder sticking out of the snow! How I had missed it I'll never know, except that the sun was in my eyes and I was looking up at the tree and not down where I was walking.
I climbed up out of the gorge and went to find the kids, who thought I looked pretty awesome with blood dripping everywhere.
“Grandma,” Rylyn told me, “you should fall in the snow next year for Halloween. It would make a great costume!”
My oldest daughter, Linnea, dug through her purse and found a butterfly bandage and three napkins.
“You've got a pretty bad cut on your forehead, mom,” she told me as she tried to clean me up. “You'll probably need to have Uncle Alan stitch it up for you.”
Linnea had decided the previous year that she wanted to become a doctor, so I guess it was good practice for her to try to close the gash and put on the bandage. Thank goodness it didn't hurt too bad, but I sure felt silly.
After we got home that evening I went into the bathroom to look at my face. I had a great big bump on my forehead, as well as the cut there and another one under my nose. Alan, my brother-in-law doctor, looked at my face and decided I needed to go with him to his clinic so he could give me a tetanus shot and glue the cuts together. Linnea came along to watch. Alan cleaned me up and dug a couple of little rocks out of my cuts, then glued them together with super glue, but when it was time to give me the shot he said, “Linnea, why don't you do this?”
What?
I wasn't at all sure I wanted to be Linnea's first patient, but when Alan told her to give it to me in my rear end I decided I'd rather have my daughter do it than my brother-in-law, anyway. Amazingly, the shot didn't hurt a bit, which probably means Linnea will be a great doctor some day, but hopefully she won't need to practice on me any more..
