The Beautiful Child

Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.

Robert Frost

Daughter #2 was a beautiful baby. People frequently stopped me on the street or in the store to comment on her thick curls, her impossibly long eyelashes, and her luminous dark eyes. When I brought her home from the hospital, my neighbors were so glad she wasn’t another Wild Voorhies boy, they festooned the trees in my front yard with pink ribbons. Her older siblings doted on her, carting her around with them so often that her first word (after Mama and Dada) was “leavemelone”.

But she was a restless sleeper, throwing her body around in circles and kicking the bed covers onto the floor. At age one, she and I went to Cedar City to watch my brother and his wife graduate from SUU. I didn’t own a porta-crib, and they didn’t have one either, so Daughter #2 and I shared a bed. She tossed and turned so much that I had several visible bruises on my arms the next morning.

One winter night, a couple of years later, my husband awakened suddenly out of a sound sleep. “Do you hear that?” he nudged me.

 I yawned. “Hear what?” I said. A storm had kicked up, and we could see heavy snow falling outside our bedroom window. “It’s just the wind,” I assured him as I rolled over and went back to sleep.

But he couldn’t shut his eyes; an indefinable something was nagging at him. Uncharacteristically, he slid out of bed, standing in the dark room, listening for a sound he couldn’t quite hear. Without turning on the lights so as not to reawaken me, he moved quietly into the hall and stood for a moment more. It was then that he recognized a faint noise coming from somewhere beyond the kitchen. When he realized what it was, he raced down the hall past the breakfast bar and into the dining room, turning on lights as he ran.

Standing outside our sliding glass door, with snow swirling around her, was our three-year-old daughter. Her pajamas were soaked, and there was ice in her hair. She was knocking on the window and sobbing, “Daddy, I’m cold. The door won’t open. Daddy, where are you?”

Slamming the glass aside, he swooped her into his arms, yelling for me as he sprinted back into our room. She was chilled to the bone and shivering uncontrollably while I pulled off her sopping wet clothes. My husband went for dry sleepers and a heating pad. We laid her under our blankets between us, sharing our body heat with her. It was a long time before she fell asleep, and even longer before her little body stopped shuddering.

The next morning, we found that the temperature had fallen into the low 20s. The storm laid 3 to 4 inches of snow on the ground. From what she was able to tell us, Daughter #2 woke up and decided to go outside to play. She went down the stairs and out the front door, but the dark scared her. When she tried to get back in, the door had locked after her, so she went around to the back door, where her daddy had somehow heard her over the roar of the storm outside.

What we learned that night is that some things are beyond coincidence or even luck. When the storm comes, the winds howl, and we are alone in the dark and the cold, Someone is watching over us. We are never truly alone.