Sunday morning, on the darkest day of the year, we planned to sleep in, maybe even drink coffee in bed and listen to the radio and read. The sun (what little there is of it) wouldn’t be up until about nine. The weather was miserable, rain and snow and wind. At about 5:30 the phone rang waking me out of a hard sleep. I wasn’t sure where I was. I panicked a minute– had there been another slide? Was something wrong on the hill where my daughter and sister live?
It was Janice from Haines Assisted Living, my friend Betty was in an ambulance on the way to the clinic. “She’s okay, I think, but we wanted to be sure,” she said. She’d had a little spell. She gets them. “She wanted me to tell you.” So, I got dressed and went out, of course I did, and when I arrived at the back door of the clinic, I was asked to trade my mask for their sanitized masks, use the hand disinfectant, and come on in. Betty was on the bed, and there was Amber, the sweet and capable nurse and young mother who looks about sixteen and is wiser and calmer than I am. She has a family, little children at home, and they were all out of their house for a week, as it was on the edge of a potential slide area. She gently assured Betty while checking all the things she should. Then in came my friend, Dr. Julia, her hair all every which way from sleeping in the clinic on call, I guessed– and she too gave me and Betty a big smile (the kind you can see through a mask.) Julia and Betty are old friends. We all joked that some people will do anything to see her friends in person. (It has been months since Betty and I were in the same room, as a Covid precaution. The last time Julia and I talked face to face was riding bikes in the fall.) So we sat and stood and chatted and figured out what ailed Betty, which turned out not to be serious, but maybe was even the kind of ache and pain we are all feeling this holiday season, the kind that comes from missing each other and the small warm gatherings inside, together like this, out of the storm.
I worried a little about how I was going to drive Betty back to HAL, my Suburu almost didn’t make it up Cemetery Hill. The roads were still awful, and even where they had been plowed, were icy now. It would be challenging to get in and out safely with the bad footing, too.That’s when Amber said the ambulance crew was on their way to give Betty a lift the three blocks home. And in came Fireman Al, who said hi and nodded in his nice humble way, and then a woman I couldn’t recognize in her mask, winter hat, and EMT clothes, “Nice to see you Miss Betty,” she said. There was a young man in a Capital City Fire and Rescue shirt, and Julia greeted him and said she was glad he was still here. Juneau must have sent some extras up to Haines for our emergency. He said he was heading home soon, but figured he’d help on this call.
The darkest morning of the year was very bright. And it wasn’t just the emergency room lighting. It was those good people, the night travelers as Rumi called them, who no doubt had felt a little like I had when they got the call on Sunday morning to leave their homes and warm beds, who had other plans– or at least wouldn’t have minded an extra hour of sleep– but who when they saw Betty and me, acted for all the world as if there was no place they’d rather be, and no one they’d rather see.
Sit with your friends; don’t go back to sleep
Don’t sink like a fish to the bottom of the sea.
Life’s water flows from darkness.
Search the darkness don’t run from it.
Night travelers are full of light,
and you are, too; don’t leave this companionship. – Rumi
