The Nurse Who Came Up Mom’s Porch Steps

On the Porch

I carried the rocker cushion out and set it right. Verna brought her black bag out and set it on the boards beside the rocker, where she could reach it.

Then she walked Mom through the storm door and across the porch to the rocker, and nobody rushed.

When Mom sat down in the sun she closed her eyes and tipped her face up to it. “Oh,” she said.

“Oh, that’s nice.” It was the first time she had been outside her own door since the ambulance carried her off in January.

The lawn was half brown grass and half melting snow, white patches shrinking in the noon light.

The trees along the road were bare against a sky so blue it looked painted.

Verna handed Mom the new pill box to hold so she could get used to it.

Mom held it in her lap with both hands, opening and closing the Monday lid. Then Verna got down on her knees on the porch boards.

Mom told her to get up off that floor or she would never get back up. Verna said she would get up fine, and to give her a foot.

She slipped off Mom’s slipper and cupped her heel in her palm, the way you would hold a baby bird.

“Point your toes at me, Bozie. Now point them at the sky. Now at me. That’s your ankle pumps. You do ten every hour you’re awake, to keep the blood moving so you don’t get a clot. I’ll be counting.”

“You always were bossy,” Mom said. Verna said she had been fifteen and had run that pie stand by herself, thank you very much. And that is how the two of them got started on the fair.

The 1962 County Fair

I do not know who brought it up first. I think it was Mom, about the rhubarb.

“You charged me fifteen cents for a slice,” she said. “Fifteen cents. Everyone else was charging a dime.” Verna said it was a better pie.

“It was mostly crust,” Mom said, and Verna told her to take that back. Then Mom said Verna would not give my father a piece at all, because he did not have the nickel.

Verna said that boy had no business on the Ferris wheel with a girl he had just met.

My father met my mother at the county fair in the summer of 1962. She was twenty and had a dress entered in the open class.

He was nineteen and had come to look at the cattle. He saw her by the pie stand and asked her to ride the Ferris wheel.

She said she would not ride with a stranger. He said he would not be a stranger by the top.

They got stuck up there for eleven minutes while a man fixed something with a wrench, and by the time they came down, she knew his whole family.

Eight years later, when their first baby was a boy, they named him Ferris.

“He bought you a slice after,” Verna said.

“He came back with a dime he’d borrowed off his cousin. You two shared it on the hay bales behind the show barn, and I watched you like a hawk the whole time.”

Mom said she had been spying. Verna said she was fifteen, and it was the most exciting thing she had ever seen.

Mom laughed so hard she had to put a hand on her chest, and Verna laughed on her knees on the porch boards, still holding Mom’s heel.

Mom’s toes were pointing at the sky and then at Verna and then at the sky again, and I do not think she knew she was doing it.

That was when I saw it. For the first time since January, my mother was not afraid of her own leg.

I leaned against the porch post in my camel coat and did not say a word. I did not want to break it.