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Authors: Patti Hill

BOOK: Seeing Things
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You're talking to the queen of skepticism right here.
I roll my eyes over newspaper stories where teary-eyed folks report they've seen Jesus in a potato chip. That sort of hogwash sends me straight to the comics for a dose of reality. You don't have to worry about me. I know Alley Oop doesn't slide through time, but the inhabitants of Moo remind me of my friends in Ouray with their common sense and heave-ho attitudes, something sorely missing among the potato chip crowd. Honestly, someone isn't rowing with both oars in the water.
Let's proceed with this understanding: God shaped the Grand Tetons with the power of his Word. No overcooked potato chip evokes that kind of awe. Sadly, some people fritter the good sense God gave them on happenstance and wishful thinking. Despite my adventures into the whimsical, I'm not one of them. Not that anyone can prove anyway.
Because I've lived among the wild things all of my life, it's not my habit to shrink back from anything. I've thrown snakes out of the house by their rattles and snatched a toddling son from the path of a charging moose, and there's nothing meaner in nature than a moose cow if she doesn't like the way you look. And I won't shrink back from telling my story as soon as I hit my stride. You see, I like to think I'm a reasonable person. Chatting up my problems with a literary character scoots me several degrees east of rational as far as I'm concerned, so I'd kept mum about my visits with Huckleberry Finn. Until now.
Who can keep a secret like that?
Once word leaked that I chatted with Huck, the offers came pouring in to write my story. I suppose with so many Boomers out there sitting in orthopedic waiting rooms and making transoceanic flights, there's a call for old-lady stories to make those folks feel better about themselves. Well, my story will certainly do that.
One name-dropping literary agent wanted to represent me something fierce. She declared old-lady stories all the rage among reviewers and New York City publishing houses. It's about time, is all I can say. Before I knew it, she'd sent me an old woman's memoir about her life in Iowa during the Depression. Someone who thinks pretty highly of himself declared the book one of the best written last year. I don't mean to cast aspersions on the author, but for a woman in her eighties she sure remembers a lot of details from the year she turned five years old. I can't remember what I had for lunch yesterday, although I ate a piece of peach pie with a dollop of whipped topping afterward. I love that about getting older. I'm on my way to looking like Buddha, and I don't care one lick.
That's enough stalling. The telling of this story won't get any easier if I chase every stray thought, so I'd better get to it. Promise to give me a fair hearing and proceed.
Chapter 1
I stood at the top of the stairs kneading the newel post. The oven timer groaned from the kitchen below. Four pies—two apple, a cherry, and an elderberry—filled the house with a nutty sweetness, meaning the crust was golden and the sauce had thickened around the fruit. I'd finished my shower and started toward the kitchen long before the timer sounded, but now I stood frozen like a raccoon in the beam of a flashlight. Such bold marauders.
Below me, the stairs were a mountainside of wildflowers—a swath of starry edelweiss and buttercups, lupine and red gilia—all growing among granite boulders and spiked grasses from the second-floor landing to the first floor. A breeze that neither lifted my apron nor jostled my curls, whipped the grass and set the flowers dancing.
The timer grew more insistent. Nutty sweetness turned bitter, a sign the pies' crusts had edged beyond golden to toasted. I closed my eyes, but the mountainside remained. I knew better. A few weeks earlier I'd sat on the top step, enjoying the deep purple of the lupine and watching a deliciously red ladybug crawl across a boulder, but I hadn't had pies in the oven that day, only a load of towels in the dryer.
The timer groaned on, sounding a bit tired from its unanswered call. I slid my foot down the step's riser, willing my brain to ignore the flowery slope and to think of stairs, predictable and ordered. One step. Two steps. A boulder?
“You're not there,” I said to the boulder. “I can walk right through you, yes I can. And I will.”
Fooling myself proved harder than I thought.
I overstepped and missed the next stair. My ankle twisted and cracked like kindling. I fell forward, reached for the railing that had belatedly reappeared, but my knee hit the wooden stair hard, and my head bounced on the last two risers before I came to a stop. A hot poker of pain seared my ankle. I fumbled with my sneakers and screamed with the movement. With reluctant fingers, I felt a lump rising over my ankle bone. My foot lay at an unnatural angle. I writhed like a landed trout on the floor. I needed help, but moving only intensified the pain.
Bee's dog door slammed shut, and her claws tapped eagerly across the floor. She stopped, tilted her head as if to ask:
What kind of game is this?
She held a tennis ball in her mouth.
You've got to be kidding. “Not now, Bee. Go away!”
She slunk toward me, dropped the ball in my lap, and nosed my hand.
My ankle screamed and so did I. “Bee!”
She lapped at my face and made to sit across my lap. I pushed hard on her chest, but she lowered herself slowly to straddle my legs, all seventy pounds of her. With my ankle crying for attention, I debated who to call. I hated to make a fuss, but I knew the EMTs in town; Tom and Veryl liked nothing better than sounding the sirens.
Then twinkling lights danced before my eyes, and the decision left my hands.
Chapter 2
It had taken no small amount of cajoling on my son's part to convince me to recuperate at his home in Denver. Denver is a good three hundred miles from Ouray and light years from mountain living. Andy eventually agreed to bring Bee along, and I promised to bake him a strawberry-rhubarb pie once I felt up to it. In the end the fact that there's a toilet on the ground floor of his home persuaded me, but Andy didn't know that.
My daughter-in-law Suzanne—Andy's second wife of eight very long years—had already purchased an adjustable bed for my use. More than once over the years, while waiting for the Mylanta to do its trick around midnight, I'd reached for the telephone during a Craftmatic commercial. Anyway, that's how I found myself ensconced in eiderdown pillows in my son's fancy-schmancy guest bedroom with an attached bathroom.
I lay flat on my back with Suzanne standing over me, hands deep in the pockets of the lab coat she wore over algae-green scrubs. She no longer wore her nearly black hair cut to her chin. Instead, she sported a Cleopatra do with thick, blunt bangs and hair that slid over her shoulders like silk. Andy stood with his back to me, looking out a glass door into the night. Tall, broad shouldered. So like his pa. Yet so not.
“I've arranged everything,” Suzanne said. “You have a series of post-op appointments arranged with Dr. Milner. He's known internationally for his work with world-class athletes. Fortunately his wife's breast augmentation went splendidly, and he owes me. You'll see him Tuesday.”
What day is this? “Thank you for going to so much trouble, Suzanne.”
She demonstrated the functions of the bed. With a hum, I rose to a sitting position. Much better. Bee nuzzled my hand. I fingered her ears like a worry stone. Another hum and my feet rose. A human taco, but the ache in my ankle receded.
“Everything you need is on this nightstand,” she said, her voice a mix of Florence Nightingale and Old Mother Hubbard. My chest warmed. “Ring this bell for Lupe, our housekeeper. You may have to ring twice, but she'll come eventually, or you're to let me know. Here are your pain pills—it's important to take them as scheduled. You don't want the pain to get away from you, so even if you're feeling good, take a pill at the scheduled time.”
I'd already heard this speech innumerable times by my surgeon and a bevy of nurses.
She continued. “And drink lots of water. Lupe will keep you supplied with plenty of chilled Evian.” She shook something rod-like at me that rattled. “I've divided out your blood pressure and cholesterol meds into a pill organizer.”
I'm not helpless. “You're very kind.”
“No problem,” she continued. “And I've taken the liberty of prescribing a stool softener. Surgery can wreak havoc with digestion and elimination, especially since you won't be very active for the next eight weeks.”
“
Six
weeks,” I said a tad too eagerly. “I mean, my surgeon said six weeks.”
Andy walked to the foot of the bed. “He said six to eight weeks, Ma.”
“I'm a quick healer. Remember? I have the bones of a thirty-year-old. That's from all the hiking and dancing.”
Andy spoke slowly. “Ma, the break was bad. Both the fibula and tibia. We're going to take this one day at a time.”
Where's the phone?
“And Mom,” Suzanne said, presenting a walker at the bedside. “My nurses tricked out a walker for you—a water bottle holder, a zippered pouch you can use as a purse, and this little pouch works like a pocket. I hope you like it. Andy suggested the royal blue. He says you love color. Any questions about how to use the brakes?”
Physical therapists had pressed me to take one more lap around the ward with a walker during my hospital stay. The Continental Divide now separated me from their bullying. I smiled. “I don't think so. I've used one before.”
My ankle throbbed. I wanted to be alone, but Suzanne, obviously proud of the preparations she'd made for me, yammered on. “Now, in the bathroom, you'll find a wheeled stool to help you move around. Also, the plumber installed a handheld shower and a grab bar.”
A plumber? “I had no idea my stay would create such a problem . . . and expense. I don't know what to say.”
Andy patted my good foot. “Ma, we're happy to do it. Just relax and enjoy.”
Could I do that?
“How long since your last pain pill?” Suzanne asked.
I covered my eyes to concentrate. I took a pill at the pharmacy, didn't I? And another when Andy stopped for gas in Edwards, I think. “I'm not sure.”
Suzanne expelled a long sigh. “Are you hurting?”
What a question. “Yes.”
“On a scale from one to ten?”
“Seven-point-three.”
Water sloshed into a glass and the top popped off a pill bottle. “As I said, you've got to stay on top of the pain,” Suzanne said with some irritation in her voice. “What are you thinking?”
What was
I
thinking? I wanted to be in my own bed where pain in or out of control was nobody's business but my own.
“Andy, help your mother take a pill. I'm beat. Rounds come early.” She bent to touch my cheek with hers. “We'll take good care of you.” And she left.
In the dark, after Andy left, I found the telephone and held the handset to my chest, wondering who I should call. Josie, my best friend in the world, slept like a brick. Besides, she hated talking on the telephone—she feared developing brain cancer from the receiver. I wouldn't talk to her until I returned to Ouray.

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