The Long Drive to Bring Grandma Home

Nine hours if you don’t stop

It was still dark when I pulled out of the driveway, and the snowbanks along the road were blue in the headlights. Hazel slept through the first two hours like she had been waiting her whole life for a long drive.

I stopped the first time in a gas station parking lot on the south side of the Cities. I nursed her in the back seat with my coat around both of us and the engine running for heat, and I changed her on the passenger seat.

My doctor would not have liked what I was doing. I knew that. I’d had a regular delivery and I was cleared to drive, but nine hours in a car at fifteen days postpartum was not what anyone had in mind when they cleared me.

I kept going anyway. I had a full tank, a cooler of milk, and a little girl whose grandmother had never smelled her head.

Somewhere past Owatonna the sun came up gray and flat over the fields, and the snow started to thin out into brown stubble. By Albert Lea, I could see the ground in long stripes between the drifts.

I pulled into the rest area outside Albert Lea at almost exactly ten o’clock. Hazel was still asleep, so I pumped in the driver’s seat with the heater running and a burp cloth over my shoulder, while truckers walked their dogs past my windshield.

I remember thinking that if anyone had told me a year before that I would be doing this, I would have laughed. I was a second-grade teacher. I made seating charts. I color-coded things.

Then we crossed into Iowa, and the snow was gone, and I felt something in my chest come loose that had been wound up tight for two weeks.