St. Louis, Missouri, has some of the most extreme weather I have ever experienced. Spring, Summer, and Fall’s thunderstorms were terrifying. Straight-line winds often preceded by howling gusts that bent even the oldest oak trees over, accompanied the darkest black or grayish-green skies. Lightning, splintering the horizon, shook the earth as if it had no substance at all.
The winters were hardly any better. Bleak skies dominated the landscape, and even though we didn’t get the volume of snowfall we did when living in Massachusetts, the brutal temperatures of the season trumped all. I remember school being cancelled one day because the wind chill was double digits below zero.
So it is no wonder, when I was pregnant with my third child who was due in February, that I carried around worry when thinking about the possible scenarios of making the trip to the hospital.
The same held true when I fretted about how I would drive through the snow-bound countryside of Massachusetts to get my late husband—who had been placed on the heart transplant list in November—to the hospital forty minutes away should the gift of a heart become available. Worry jingled in my head like loose change in a pocket.