The Hancock-Henderson Quill, Inc.
4/8/2009 column
It is hard to believe the TV show ER came to a close this past week. It was one of the first shows that Mark and I watched together every Thursday evening. It was our “soap opera”. I think we enjoyed it because we could relate.
Before I reached high school, I made more trips to the ER than I could count on one hand. I was such a klutz.
I am the only person I know that has been run over by their own car. My mom still shakes her head on that one.
By the time I reached high school I was sending other people to the doctor’s office. I broke my brother’s wrist sledding. I broke my best friend’s finger blocking a spike in warm-ups before a game. I guess I was still a klutz, just more dangerous to those around me.
Mark also made his fair share of runs to the emergency room after losing battles with pitchforks, chain saws and bale kickers. It is hard to believe that we survived to find each other. I guess you can say we were destined to be together, but were our children cursed to grow up in the ER based on our history?
It took 17 years before we had to make our first emergency room run with one of the children. Like a really bad novel, it happened on a dark and stormy night. Winds whipped sheets of rain against the windshield of the van as Jonathon and I made our injury run to the hospital. We were greeted by automatic sliding doors and a security guard. Jonathon walked around the metal detector and I set it off with my keys and metal bowl. There was never this much security at “County” on ER and they were in the bad part of Chicago! Once I convinced the security guard that I was more dangerous than anything he could find in my purse if I didn’t get my son to the doctor, he let me go. Never mess with a “momma bear protecting her cub”.
The attendants quickly escorted Jonathon to a room and started putting sheets of spongy blue coolants on his face. He looked like the “man behind the iron mask”. Calmly, Jonathon recounted his story to the nurses and doctors as they continued to work on cooling the burns to his face.
Jonathon has developed a low-cost system of making maple syrup. He built a cooker out of concrete blocks in a ditch north of the house. He uses a broken tractor exhaust pipe for a smoke stack with a bent coffee can to direct the smoke and ashes away from the pan of sap. He pours 50 gallons of sap into a used, but clean metal mineral lick tank to start cooking off the water. He uses dead limbs and logs around the farm to keep the fire burning.
He had been cooking down syrup all day when it started to drizzle. He figured he would shut down for the night and start again the next day to finish off his latest batch. Because he didn’t want to get wet, he put on his insulated coveralls, winter gloves and a baseball cap and stocking cap to keep the rain out of his eyes and his ears warm. As he was carrying the pan of hot sap out of the ditch, he stumbled and the pan landed on the ground. As the pan came to a sudden stop, the sap splashed up on Jonathon’s face as he closed his eyes and tried to turn his head in a knee-jerk reaction. He quickly grabbed nearby snow and put it on his face. He figured he wasn’t hurt too badly because it didn’t burn, so he continued to put the pan in the back of the truck and haul it to the yard. By the time he got into the house, his face was starting to warm up very quickly. We couldn’t get his face cooled off enough and I knew that Tylenol wasn’t going to stay ahead of his pain. By now his face was starting to peel.
We found a bowl big enough for him to dunk his face into as we drove in the storm to the hospital. Between gulps of air he joked that he was going to be hard to beat in a bobbing for apples. He was also thankful that prom wouldn’t be for another five weeks and that he should be healed up by then. I marveled at his humor in dealing with his pain and how he has matured into a strong young man.
Two weeks later, you can’t even tell that he had been burned. His face has a “slight sunburn” look and his brothers assure him that he is as ugly as ever. He continues to make maple syrup and life goes on.
Grandma was a little upset that we didn’t tell her about Jonathon’s accident right away. We assured her that her prayers had been answered in the fact that Jonathon wasn’t hurt very seriously and we made the emergency room run safely on a dark stormy night.
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* As their 4 children pursue dairy careers off the farm, Natalie and Mark are starting a new adventure of milking registered Holsteins just because they like good cows on their Minnesota farm. Natalie grew up in Stronghurst, the daughter of Becky and the late Larry Dowell.
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