The Guardian Angel

 Photo Courtesy Lori Morris

The ice that covered the road sparkled in the morning sun as I strapped my kids into their car seats. My husband, who’d left earlier, had called and told me he thought I’d make it into town just fine if I took it slow along the two miles of county road before I hit the state highway, which had been salted and sanded. Still a voice in the back of my head whispered, “I don’t know about this.”

             I considered staying home, but an appointment made with an out-of-town client who only had today to select and buy a home led my over developed sense of responsibility to expunge that little voice and send it off to wherever better judgment resides. So here I was, standing in below zero windchill, my car canted nose down in the ditch, a mile from home and a mile from the highway. The stretch of road where I slid off was inconveniently located where no farmhouses were close by. The snow splotched corn stubble and dried stalks of last season’s soybeans stretched out as far as I could see. It was a landscape frozen in icy suspension. Not even the red-tailed hawks that relentlessly hunted these fields were out today.

 It was 1992, cell phones weren’t in general use. If I’d been alone, perhaps I could have walked the mile home, even carrying my one-year-old, but my toddler wouldn’t make it.

            I took a deep breath of frigid air that tightened the back of my throat and exhaled in a cloud of vapor, my eyes watering. I figured I’d have icicles hanging off my eyelashes by the time this mishap was over.

 I looked up and down the road in both directions, but all was still and empty. I glanced into the car. My girls were bundled up in snow suits, their pink knit caps pulled down to the tops of their eyes--eyes that looked at me accusingly, I thought, for being such a careless Mommy.

            In the distance I thought I heard a clatter that might be the sound of an engine. And sure enough, an old white Toyota pick-up emerged from a dip in the road. There was rust around the wheel wells and the bumpers were battered and looked as if they were attached with baling twine, but the driver saw me and slowly pulled alongside.

            He rolled down his window, “I can have you out of there in a jiff,” he said.

            “Thank you,” was all I could think of to say, as exhaust fumes from the truck’s leaky muffler floated around me.

            He hopped out of the cab and dug into the truck bed, hauling out a tow chain.

“Are you sure there’s enough traction to get me out?” I tilted my head towards the sheet of ice that covered the road.

            He pointed at his tires, “Chains.”

            “Do I need to get my kids out?” I wasn’t convinced the car wouldn’t slide around—the truck was a small one.

            “Nah, let ‘em stay warm, they’ll be fine.” He pulled the collar of his Carhart jacket up around his neck a little more snugly. “That wind is somethin’, isn’t it,” he said more to himself than to me.

            He quickly attached the chain to the frame of my car, then hooked it to the trailer hitch on the Toyota and nimbly jumped back into the truck. A slow tug and like a champagne cork, my car popped back out onto the road. “Thank you so much! What do I owe you,” I asked.

            “Nothin’, it’s why I keep a tow chain in the back.” He rolled up his window, waved, and drove away.

            I thought about that man and his truck for weeks after we slid into the ditch. Our road mostly carried local traffic, and I was familiar with the vehicles that came by daily. I’d never seen that truck before, and I never saw it again. It occurred to me that maybe we all have a guardian angel or two that turn up when we need them most. Mine doesn’t have a halo or wings. Mine looks like a guy in a grease stained Carhart jacket who drives a beat-up old Toyota truck.