PenWomanShip

In Oregon, most lightning is brittle, Jove's halfhearted imperious edicts from the heavens to locally cringing earth. Last night, Big Mama Nature displayed a saucy irreverence, challenging even the location of dawn.

The door from our bedroom onto the north patio is glass-paneled. While my eighty-seven-year-old husband Earl recuperates in a rehabilitation center after hip surgery, I sleep fitfully alone. But the lightning - a favorite from my upbringing in America's Mid-West - would probably have wakened me in any case. I love the wildness of it, the power, and the perspective.

We humans in our prescribed routines begin to believe we are in charge.

We're not.

A fiery bolt challenges a mortal's mantle of invincibility. I know I belong to something greater than my petty dreams, if only in my minerals and elements.

Often Oregonians don't grasp this message. Tornadoes seldom suck away their homes leaving only traces of a stone front stoop and slender arch of shower plumbing to remind them where they built.

Hurricanes rarely swoosh through bending treetops to genuflect to earth in their violent dance.

Except in high altitudes, even snowstorms are seldom fierce and rarely leave their smothering white to be dug out or roofs chipped of heavy ice.

There simply are not enough reminders that we belong to the earth that Oregonians carry the knowledge in our gut or in our hearts.

Instead I ensnare myself in day to day. I boast triumphant maneuvering Jack versus Jill, forgetting that Jove chuckles, knowing that two days from now Jill will be promoted over both Jack and me.

A young woman driving a red sports car squeezes in between me and the car ahead to exit the Sunset Highway, though there isn't another car behind me for a thousand feet. I honk. As she slows to enter the off-ramp, I pass her with words I'm glad she cannot hear with her window rolled up.

As though it mattered.

Only later do I realize that I wasn't angry about her silly aggression. I was upset that my Earl has developed an infiltrate in his right lung base. It's hard to forgive the too-busy R.N. who realized he ought to have a respiration therapy toy where he would blow into a tube and try to raise a plastic ball. That would have helped him take the huge breaths that would keep the lungs clear. She thought of it, even told me he should have one, and then forgot to give it to him.

She and several of the other nurses promised him his post-operative pain medication but would forget for an hour - or two hours even when he finally broke down to press his call light.

The Thursday morning he was transferred from Providence Hospital to the rehab facility in our small rural town, Earl had been promised a pain pill before he sat up in the wheelchair for fifty + minutes to ride in the ambulance car. The staff never did get around to getting it for him.

He was gritting his teeth by the time the Camelot Care Center staff eased him into his bed.

None of that had to be. I was beside myself with anger and fatigue and frustration.

So on Friday, when Earl was settled and almost comfortable in his new room, I sat with him all morning to be sure he was well. And then I asked if he would mind if I went to the coast overnight to gather strength within myself again.

"Of course I don't mind," he smiled. He'd never minded my slipping away when I needed to.

But after I left, his little fever returned. He squirmed in his bed. The nurses called the doctor after listening to his lungs. That is when they found the pneumonia on X-ray. He was started on antibiotics, but he had a restless night.

His son and daughter and son-in-law had visited Friday night. I wasn't there.

Saturday I felt better, but would love to have stayed another day to recuperate. My migraines are always worse when I'm tired and I'd been fighting the whole week since surgery. But knowing how much Earl depends on me when he doesn't feel well, I hurried back to Forest Grove. Hurried for a while. Traffic was fitful. Construction delays left us all fit to be tied. I made it to Camelot about quarter after eleven.

His son and daughter and son-in-law sat perched on the edges of their chairs. His son's eyebrows rose as I came into the room.

Nothing much was said but the tension escalated with every move or interaction. Earl huddled hangdog. No one accused me of not being there to prevent the mishaps. Out loud, at any rate.

The disharmony fed on each sibling's concern. I made sure Earl had what was needed and excused myself and came home. Twice I tried to get up to go to him, hoping everyone had left. But the glittering lights behind my eyes intensified as I rose, and the headache was nauseating.

Earl's son called. "He's not better. It's obvious he's worse. They've called the medical director but there's another guy on call for him."

"Did the nurses reach him?"

"Yeah, but I don't know the guy. And Dad doesn't either."

"Does Earl have a fever? Has the rapid heart rate returned? Have they done any tests?"

"They say his vital signs are even better than yesterday."

"Then in what way is he worse?" I almost asked what he had to compare Earl's condition against since he'd never visited at the hospital in Portland.

"He's just not doing well. I want to call Dr. Bump. He knows Dad."

"But he's retired. He's been out of medical practice for months now. I don't see what he could do."

"He might be able to tell us what to do, who to call."

"I thought the nurses had already called."

"I want to do something and I'm asking for your help."

Earl's son fidgets when his father is ill or hurt. He comes - at times - but his tension worries Earl, who then has gnawing suspicions that there is something that we aren't telling him.

"No," I said, too drained for anything but a direct comment, "it sounds more like you're taking over. It's all right, Hon. Do it. Or leave it alone and let him rest."

"Oh," he said. There was a long pause. "Okay then," he said, and hung up.

Jove must have had a belly laugh over all of this, but I couldn't quite convince myself enough that I, too, could laugh.

It took me hours of reassuring, explaining, prompting, and urging to settle things back to progress for Earl. I love to be there him, but it is demanding. I needed to know where all this fits in the world.

And at 3 A.M. today, Mama Nature gave me back perspective. That's what storms do for me.

And Mama did herself proud. She lit up the southern sky so the glow of pearl and pink said sunrise, though I know it's never shone its face there in the 5000+ years of man's viewing.

And as I stood in my robe on the front porch, leaning with relief and joy against the brick pillar, she glared and flourished and curtsied and flashed and glittered and shot tentacles of brilliance north and east along Portland's West Hills. Always horizontal. She never bothered to compete with Jove's thunderbolts, but blazoned her own vivid opalescence episodes that overwhelmed the southern sky.

"Thank you, Lord," I whispered. "I know. Thank you."

I slept.

Today Earl walked longer, sat up taller, even stood at the bathroom sink to brush his teeth. When I left, he lay relaxed and happy, knowing he was getting well.

Storms do that for me. Whatever my burdens, I give myself to the lightning.

Mary Jane Nordgren is a retired family doctor and teacher, now living with her husband Earl (the hero of her book EARLY: Logging Tales Too Human to be Fiction) in Forest Grove, Oregon. Their home overlooking five Cascade peaks often rings with the laughter of children as the families gather.