A Blog of Flashbacks

I Missed That Winter

October 2024

I sit on the Bidjar carpet in my favorite winter jumper, the blue, green, and maroon one, the baby grand piano in the background. I am five. Christmas Eve night  I wake up in the wee morning hours, sit on the stairway to see Santa Claus, but grow too sleepy and cold to wait. I go back to bed. Not only did I miss Santa, but as it turned out I missed that winter.

The household wakes up. We must get dressed and make our beds before breakfast.

The Christmas tree is in the dining room, but all the presents are on individual chairs in the living room. After the breakfast dishes are washed, dried, and put away, we line up by age in the front hall, Grandma first and I last. I consider it unfair that I am last because I am the most excited. We find our chairs and open presents one by one going around the circle.

After mid-day Christmas dinner, I sit on the carpet with my new clown doll, opened this morning. My hair, parted down the middle, has bows on either side. I kneel on the davenport, look out the window. The dull winter grass lies forlorn on the family ski hill as I beg for cold afternoon air for snow. None comes. Christmas with no snow!

After a week back at school, I have a throat so sore I remember its acute pain the rest of my life. I tell Mummie my throat hurts. She tells me it’s just a cold and to go to kindergarten anyway. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday I tell her, but go to school each day. By Friday, I’m so sick, I can’t get out of bed. Dr. Mirriam, Dr. Joe to our parents in front of us children, comes, sits on the bed beside me. He looks at my throat and stomach, then says “She has scarlet fever.” As he gets up, he bumps his head on the top bunk and announces,

“Ruth, you need to move her to a different bed, or I won’t come back.”

I know he is teasing her. I move to my parents’ bedroom down the big second floor hall. I live in the bed by the door for the next three months. I am so sick, no one sleeps on the second floor but my mother and me.

For the next three months, my breakfast is oatmeal with sugar and milk served in a small Haviland or Limoges bone China bowl that rests on its matching plate. Lunch is cinnamon sugar on toast and a cup of very weak tea with a bit of milk in it, cambric tea. A tea as light as the summer fabric. The teacup and saucer, also fine bone China, vary from day to day. Supper is chicken noodle soup.

These meals arrive in Mummie’s hands three times a day. She brings them on the maple bedtable. It has legs with round curves in them. Best of all, it has various shades of wood for an inlaid border. I look forward to that table for my mother’s presence and for its distracting patterns.

As an adult, sister Hannah says she came up and to read Stuart Little to me. When she tells me, I remember her sitting on the edge of the bed. I have little memory of Stuart other than the illustrations. She tries to make me interested. In a week or two, I am too sick for her to come.

Winter is my favorite season, but this year, I miss the whole of it. The scarlet fever gets worse. It’s a winter of sick, Mummie, the three meals, naps, the flowered wallpaper, vomiting, the bedpan, and the bedtable.

I spend most of time alone even though there are other people who live in the house. My three siblings, my father, a grandmother, an aunt or two, two cousins. And Cocoa, sister Mary’s collie. It’s 1947, my mother oversees this household of nine.

I have a small lamb’s wool stuffed sheep that’s a little longer than my hand. It lives in bed with me. I get sick all over him, but Mummie washes him. He still smells bad, so he gets a douse of perfume that will last for five years or more.

Dr. Mirriam becomes Dr. Joe to me as I get sicker and sicker. Mirriam is too long to say. I keep hearing Mummie call him Dr. Joe. They do not correct me when I say it.

My temperature rises. It’s been a steady 103 F. most days. It becomes 104. Soon it will be 105.5. I slip into a coma for seven days.

I am unconscious. In a coma. Sometime that week,  Dr. Joe gives me a penicillin shot. I don’t remember getting it.

I wear my white flannel nightgown. I, in a prone position lift off the white sheet. Float above the top sheet, blanket, and seersucker counterpane, all white. Feet first, I float out the window, through glass that is no barrier. I float out the window to the Summon of Death.

All the yellow spring flowers bloom from winter’s feet of snow—jonquils, daffodils, narcissus, crocuses, tulips, hyacinths—bloom on our snow-covered Massachusetts hillside. I shift and am now vertical. I float up toward white clouds. I rise above the cirrus clouds that become the floor. White cumulonimbus clouds form parallel walls. All is blinding white. Iridescent white. I reach the top, but the cumulonimbi have grown still higher. I hear silence. I listen.

Silent for a week, something calls me back. Instantly, I hover at the window. In out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out in out. I know my mother is in there. I see her sitting in the mahogany rush bottom rocking chair, the one with no arms. In. I am through the storm and house windows. In. There is no going back as I hover over my mother mending in the rocking chair. She does not know I’m close enough to touch her. I have no memory of returning across the room to my body.

The new drug saved my life. I am awake.

I make a noise. She rises quickly from the chair, drops her mending. She is by my side.

“Mummie, what’s heaven like?”

She falls against the wall as her knees crumble beneath her. She never answers me. I don’t understand her reaction.

She has told me many times before I became ill that my grandma, my father’s mother, lost all three of her daughters before she had my father.

My poor Grandma. My fat grey Grandma Calkin knit me a grey, wool elephant. He was fat stuffed with wool. Grandma wrapped her arms around me as she taught me to knit. I cuddled to her warmth. She died before I had scarlet fever.

I slowly begin to get better. I now make it all the way to the bathroom alone, twenty-five feet from my parents’ bedroom. No more months of bedpan. Three feet at the top of the stairway is a wide river to cross. I focus on the newel post opposite. It is a lifeline to keep me from tumbling to the landing. Crossing successful, I am happy. I make it to the bathroom. Look what I did! I am well enough I just walked all the way. I sit on the toilet, hold onto the sink because it doesn’t move.

As I sit there, my arms and legs shake, turn grey or sometimes blue from my knees  to toe-tips and elbows to fingertips. Try as I might, I cannot not control the color or shaking. I watch. There are those pins and needles in my arms, legs, hands, and feet again. They keep returning. I don’t understand why the color and feelings don’t go past my knees or elbows. I can’t move so I just sit there and watch till it all goes away. I note the strange, fascinating changes again and again. I don’t tell my mother or Dr. Joe. I don’t know how.

I don’t know how serious this illness is—the uncontrollable shaking, dizziness, leaving my body, pins and needles, and fantasies.  I remember it, but it scares me to talk about it. I know the important part is I’m alive.

Late in March I have my first whole day out of living in bed, I wear the jumper I wore three months ago on the Christmas Day of the snapshot. My mother cooks breakfast, my father, siblings, grandmother, aunt, and cousin already gathered downstairs. I am expected to come down on my own. My legs tremble and wobble. I hold onto a wall, so I won’t fall. I hold onto walls for the next seventy-five years. I will feel that same dizziness overwhelm me for the rest of my life. Sometimes I feel the tremor in my knees and legs as I walk. Occasionally the pins and needles return. Rarely, but sometimes, I concentrate hard to put one foot in front of the other.   

I descend these familiar stairs for the first time in three months. I am dizzy, floating above the stairs, focusing on each step I take, holding the banister. I feel a foot on the oak stair, yet still I float out of my body. My focus is to get to the first landing. I part the curtains to grab the windowsill. I am here. Knowing I made it this far, I realize I can make it the rest of the way without flying or falling. I now also realize something in my brain is different from before I got sick. Different from me. Different from everyone I know.

I am alone.

Decades later, I see the snapshot. Seeds of joy and sadness planted those days have lasted through the winter to the now of the rest of my life. I wish I could know again the joy of that Christmas Day. Every day of snow is a day recovered from that winter and the life I lost. A life lost to the now ever-present epilepsy.

As an adult and parent, I think of how worried my parents must have felt. My mother even told me of the time her mother-in-law said to her, “I don’t know why you got to keep all three of your daughters and I didn’t get to keep any of mine.” My mother didn’t know what to say.

I thought about this statement for thirty years before I came up with an answer. “Oh, I am so sorry, but please enjoy your granddaughters.” That it took me so long to think of any possible response shows me not only my mother’s lack of response but also the power of my grandmother’s pain. As a child, Grandma’s father, a ship captain, had died at sea and four years later one of her brothers washed overboard. No, Grandma Calkin had much tragedy. I remain grateful she died two years before I had scarlet fever, grateful she did not experience the pain of almost losing a granddaughter.

I am still alone.