BRANDON WISCONSIN RR-2 53919
We are traveling along a highway going north toward Iron
Mountain, Michigan, as I begin writing. Our mission up north is not
a happy one. Sometimes one wonders about all the people one meets
upon these highways. What is their story? Where are they going?
As for us, we are on our way to visit my husband’s sister
who was struck down by a car three weeks ago. How seldom we stop to
consider what we might do to another human being when we get behind
the steering wheel of our metal machines and drive hither and yon.
This is our second trip to see her.
What started out to be a pleasure trip to view the beautiful
autumn scenery our Wisconsin produces, ended up in six fractures to
her body, and the loss of her right thumb. My dear sister-in-law is
seventy years of age, which isn’t in her favor. How little we
know of what a day can bring. But we arrived safely.
It is now the next day as I take this up again. Iron Mountain,
Mitch, boasts the ‘World’s Highest Ski Jump.’ They
claim a drop of 340 feet. On our first visit here we went out to
see it while the nurses were getting Mildred readied for the day.
With a pelvis broken on both sides, and one leg in traction, this
is no small matter. The two of us, and her husband, drove out to
look at this sport’s structure. After having seen, the day
before, what an accident can do to a human body, I stood there in
wonderment. How could any person risk their bones in such a
fashion, I asked myself? How?
And yet we had been on a busy highway traveling 170 miles, one
way, with cars and big trucks behind us, before us, beside us, and
we take it for granted, ‘Nothing is going to happen to us!’
But the law of averages says ‘It MAY happen to YOU.’ This
is the first really bad accident in our family for years. Now it
has come home, to us.
As you steam men tend your boilers under such terrific pressure
do you ever ask yourselves, ‘What if there is a weak spot
somewhere? The inspector might have missed something.’
These two trips have been eye openers to us. ‘Take
care,’ the miles seem to say. ‘Your bones may never be the
same again.’ It surely should be a reminder to us that ‘we
are fearfully and wonderfully made.’ The unusual song tells us
about the knee bone connected to the thigh bone, the thigh bone
connected to the hip bone, and even mentions the ankle bone, I
believe. The story of the coming together of the dry bones is in
Ezekiel, Chap. 37.
Somehow, we have become very aware of how our bones are
functioning, along with our muscles, and how much we have to be
thankful for.
The lady sharing Mildred’s room is seventy-five and she was
brought in with a broken hip which can’t be set because of her
physical condition. She cannot stand the strain of the needful
setting, pinning, etc. On our last visit, when we walked out of
their shared room, she called after us, ‘Now you take care of
your bones, hear? You can’t get new ones just like
that.’
We thanked her and assured her we would, but necessarily we had
to go right back into that melee of traffic and risk our bones all
over again. When Mother Shipton made her prophecy so many years
ago, and said, ‘Horseless carriages will go, and accidents fill
the world with woe,’ she knew what she was talking about.
But there was a funny side to our day, as well. There were two
young teen-age boys sharing broken legs and a room. They were
surely livening up Dickinson Hospital. They spent part of their day
recovering in wheel chairs. One day, when they thought no one was
looking, they started drag racing down the corridor in their wheel
chairs. I was just coming out of the room door, and a nurse was
emerging from another room. Needless to say, their adventure
didn’t last very long, but they surely were trying to make
things interesting around there. Mildred even laughed about it. She
was much better this last time we were up there.
The incident reminded me of the resiliency of a true Christian,
who, no matter what may befall him, can pick himself up again, and
go on in faith.
In one of our recent Sunday School lessons we were reminded that
‘trust in the Lord is health to our navel and marrow to our
bones.’ What down to earth word illustrations are given us in
our Bibles. We need our Source, we need our muscles, but we also
need our bones to hold us up. Oh dear! I almost fell over the Sauer
kraut crock last night! Then I promptly carried it to the basement.
Yes, we made Sauer kraut for the first time in our 42 years of
married life. Six gallons of it! Ecology, you know, and beating
inflation. It’s good.
So, I will leave you with the succinct advice of our elderly
lady with the broken hip. ‘Now you take care of your bones,
hear? You can’t get new ones just like that.’
