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!

Miss Ishikowa and Second Grade

Starting second grade was exciting for two reasons.  First, I got to go to a brand new school.  Second, I had a broken arm and I got to start school with my arm in a cast!  And then, there was a third reason.  My teacher's name was Miss Ishikowa, and I was almost taller than her.

When we first moved to our new home East of Mesa we were in an older school that had been around for a long time.  I liked it.  There were big, mature trees on the play ground that offered shady spots to escape the Arizona sun, and the teachers were nice.  I remember Mrs. Bateman, my first grade teacher, letting us paint a Christmas mural on white butcher paper stapled to the wall.  The kids said she melted down chalk with water and sugar to make our paint.  They said it tasted good.  I wonder if she really did?  I doubt it.

Mesa was growing quickly on the eastern side, so by the next year a new school was built.  Our house was half way between both schools, but our neighborhood was assigned to go to the new one.  I remember going with Mom and Keith to walk through the new school and meet our teachers a few days before school began.  I was so impressed, and very nervous!  Whereas the old school had been built from red brick, this new school was made from big, cream colored blocks, and it looked very modern.  Of course there were no big trees to offer shade, but the grass was already coming up, and we had a huge cement pad in the playground where we could play four-square and jacks and jump rope, and the boys played basket ball.  It was really cool!

My teacher was a lovely young Japanese American girl, with beautiful black hair and slanting eyes, and I thought she was wonderful!  She spoke softly and loved us kids, and we made the most amazing art projects that year.  For Thanksgiving she showed us how to make big white collars to put over our clothes.  We glued black ribbon on them and tied them in a bow under our chins.  She helped us girls make matching white pilgrim girl hats to wear on our heads, and I thought I looked so cute I asked Mom if I could wear my costume when we went out to Williams Air Base to have Thanksgiving dinner with Grandma Johnson.  (But that's another story for a different day.)

In the spring Miss Ishikowa taught us how to put a drop of black paint on a piece of white paper, then blow the paint with a straw, making a tree with long, willowy branches.  It was so pretty!  She let us put a long, long piece of white butcher paper on one wall of our room, and we painted a Japanese mural on it.  There was a tall, snow capped mountain in the background, a stream winding through the front with a pretty bridge over it, and a Japanese pagoda on one side.  I thought it was the loveliest picture I'd ever seen.  For Mother's Day she taught us how to make cherry blossom out of pink tissue paper which we glued onto a card for our mothers.  I found the one I made for mom just a week ago, saved in an old scrap book mother made.

I sure loved Miss Ishikowa.  Up until that time I had dreamt of becoming a nurse when I grew up, but she inspired me with a new goal.  I decided I wanted to be a second grade teacher.  Funny, I almost made it.  I've substituted in lots of second grade classrooms, but I taught 1st, 4th, 6th, and 7th. 

The only negative thing I remember from my second grade experience was knowing that I was so much bigger than most of the other little girls in my class.  I never was a skinny little girl, the word "plump" comes to mind when I look at my school pictures, and that was hard.  I wanted to be tiny and petite like my cousins.  But the day I realized I was taller than my teacher was the day I knew I would never be cute and small.  Granted, Miss Ishikowa was a tiny litttle person, but to be taller than your second grade teacher is saying something, and it wasn't something I was happy to hear.  Darn.