On the last Saturday of August, my husband stood up from the supper table to get more coffee.
And his right hand wouldn’t close on the coffee pot.
He looked down at his hand like it belonged to somebody else.
Then he turned and tried to say my name.
What came out wasn’t my name. It wasn’t any word at all.
I’m a farm wife. I’ve called the ambulance for a man pinned under a tractor. I’ve called it for a neighbor kicked in the chest by a cow.
I knew exactly what I was looking at.
I had 911 dialed before he hit the kitchen floor.
The ambulance took him to the hospital in Marshall. From there, they flew him by helicopter to Sanford in Sioux Falls.
I drove the seventy miles behind that helicopter in the dark. I had the radio off. I don’t remember one single mile of that drive.
It was a stroke. On the left side of his brain.
That’s the side, the doctor told me, that runs the right hand. And most of the words.
Four days in intensive care.
Then they moved him up to the rehabilitation floor. Where they teach grown men to walk again. To button a shirt. To say the word cup.
I slept in a vinyl chair that folded out about as far as a lawn chair. I ate out of the vending machine. And out of the cafeteria, when I remembered to.
I watched my husband, a man who could back a gooseneck stock trailer into a slot with two inches to spare on either side, work for twenty minutes to pick up a plastic spoon.
I wouldn’t have left that room for anything in this world.
And I didn’t. Not until the nurses made me.
“Carol. Go home for one night,” the charge nurse finally said on the eleventh day. Her name was Lorraine. She’d been a nurse for thirty years and didn’t take no for an answer. “Sleep in your own bed. Bring him his own pajamas. He’ll be right here when you get back.”
So I drove home that Thursday night.
And the barn was gray.
I got out of the car and stood there in the gravel. I could smell it then. That sharp, clean smell of fresh paint still curing in the cool night air.
The trim was gray too. A shade darker. The big sliding door. The haymow door. The little window on the north end where the barn cats like to sleep.
All of it.
Gray.