A Story for Another Day

by Tracie Adams

The gentle rain had started early that January morning, but by 3:00 that afternoon it had transformed our small family farm into an unrecognizable frozen landscape as the dropping temperature turned the rain to ice. Like so many other storms we encounter in life, ice storms can deceive us, catching us off guard when we aren’t expecting danger. That freezing day in January had started as an ordinary day for both me and my friend Christine, who was also watching the glistening icicles form on tree branches at her little farm many miles away. How we both looked out at those same eery, dark clouds and missed the foreshadowing of the coming events, I will never understand. Neither of us had any idea that by nightfall, the world would be a different place for both of us.

I was standing at a large picture window, admiring the view of our back pasture with horses stomping through crunchy layers of wet glaze under their hooves. They ducked through branches hanging low under the weight of the heavy frozen crystals that decorated them like Christmas lights. I heard a tap, tap, tap in the library, and it startled me for a moment before I realized it was just a frozen branch blowing against the window. When the phone rang, my heart was beating faster than usual. The storm had me on edge. I wanted my husband to get safely home in case we lost power. I stood completely still as I tried to absorb what I was hearing on the other end of the phone. My friend Christine’s two-year-old son had just died of a brain aneurysm.                 

I hung up the phone, and suddenly everything looked different. I was sobbing uncontrollably. Through my tears, the beautiful ice covered branches I had admired moments before were now silhouetted against a frigid sky that had grown dark and menacing. That chilling tapping on the windows tormented me as the house grew darker with haunting shadows.

I felt something warm running down my leg, and I thought I had peed my pants. But a few minutes later, when the first contraction came, I instinctively knew my water had broken. In survival mode now, I pushed my grieving aside, trying not to think about digging frozen earth to bury tiny coffins.  I started making all the calls: first my husband, then my midwife (who had planned the home birth, but not in an ice storm), my sister who was coming to assist in the birth, and then my best friend across the street, who would come take my other three kids to her house. 

By nightfall, I was pacing from room to room, trying to escape the pain that wrapped itself around me like the icy branches outside my window, refusing to relent. As I paced and rocked, I listened to the howling wind outside and I matched its woeful pitch with my moans. Sometimes I would cry out from the pain, and other times in grief for my friend Christine. Her loss was palpable in my bedroom, where life and death danced together in the stormy night.

She had been sitting on the side of the tub when her little Jonathan came to her complaining that his head hurt. When she tried to comfort him, she had no idea that an aneurysm had just burst inside his tiny brain. When he arrived at the hospital, he would already be gone. As darkness fell, Christine found herself holding her little boy in a hospital room one last time saying her goodbyes, singing “It’s All About You, Jesus”—the same song I had strummed on my guitar at his baby shower two years ago.

Now as I paced and moaned and listened to the incessant tapping, I felt the icy hot pain of the contractions getting stronger and stronger. It was arctic outside, but in the eery stillness of our home, the fireplace crackled and sizzled as bits of ice made pinging sounds inside the flue. Reciting passages of scriptures I had taped to the wall, I breathed rhythmically with each healing word. It was Psalm 91 that held my fear at a safe distance. When it was time to push, to bring my daughter into this world, I worked hard. I labored, as they say. I cried a lot. I cried in pain, I cried for little Jonathan, and eventually I cried for joy.

Storms can sneak up on us, and they can be devastating.  The rain will stop, the ice will melt, and the sun always shines again eventually.  But not every heart is easily convinced that the storm has passed.  We named her Elizabeth after her great grandmother, but maybe we should have called her Storm.  Oh, but that’s a story for another day.

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Tracie Adams is a writer and teacher in rural Virginia.  Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Oddball Magazine, The Write Launch, Bright Flash Literary Review, The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, Sheepshead Review and others. Follow her on Twitter @1funnyfarmAdams and on Substack @tracieadams.