The Pickup List and the Blizzard

I found out I was off the list on a Tuesday in October, standing at the counter in the school office with my granddaughter’s pink mitten in my coat pocket.

Ava had left it in my Suburban the Sunday before. I was in town anyway to drop the co-op’s deposit at the bank, so I thought I would run it over to the school and save her a cold walk to the bus.

Mrs. Kemp looked up from her desk when I came in. She has been the secretary at our school for twenty-six years, and she was the secretary when my Dustin was in kindergarten and threw up on her shoes on the first day.

“Sherry,” she said, and she did not smile. “Come around the counter a minute, would you?”

I came around. She had a green index card in her hand, the kind every family fills out in August with the names of the people the school is allowed to call and allowed to send a child home with.

“I don’t want you hearing this from somebody at the post office,” she said. “Brittany came in last week and changed the card for Hunter and Ava.”

She turned it so I could read it. My name had been on that card since Hunter started preschool.

Now there was a line through it in blue ink, and beside the line, in my daughter-in-law’s round handwriting, it said: Grandmother drives like a farmer. Not to be called.

I read it twice. Then I set Ava’s mitten on the counter, very carefully, the way you set something down when your hands are not quite your own.

“She asked me to make sure every teacher saw it,” Mrs. Kemp said quietly. “I told her that wasn’t how we did things. I told her the card was enough.

“I’m sorry, Sherry. I thought you ought to know before you came to pick them up some afternoon and I had to tell you no in front of them.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “You did right to tell me.”

I do not remember driving home.

I remember the gravel and the shelterbelt and the elevator in the rearview mirror getting smaller, and I remember that I did not cry until I had parked in the machine shed where Norm could not see me from the house.

The ditch in October

I knew what it was about. I am not so proud that I will pretend I did not.

Two weeks before that, I had the kids on a Saturday while Brittany worked a shift at the nursing home over in the next county.

I was driving them back to town in my old pickup, the Chevy with the bad heater, on the section road past the Halvorson place.

A doe came out of the shelterbelt on the right side, then a second one behind her, the way they do.

I braked and the back end came around on the loose gravel, and we went into the ditch nose first, slow, like sitting down in a soft chair.

Nobody was hurt. Both kids were buckled in their boosters, and Hunter thought it was the best thing that had ever happened to him. Ava cried for about a minute, mostly because Hunter was laughing.

Jim Halvorson saw it from his yard and came out with his tractor and a log chain and pulled me out in ten minutes. There was not a scratch on the truck that had not already been there since 2009.

When Brittany picked them up that evening, Hunter ran to her yelling, “Grandma crashed in the ditch!”

I started to explain, and Brittany said, “Okay,” in a voice I can only call tight. She buckled them into her car and drove away without asking me one question.

After that, the kids came out to the farm less. Brittany always had a reason, and the reasons were always good ones. Then there was the card.