The Pickaxe

Winter was especially cold that year, but my brother Zach and I were always excited to get out of the house and into the woods. We had everything we needed: knife, 22. Pistol, pickaxe, and a five-gallon bucket filled with all the other little things we might use. Sadly, our trapline didn’t catch anything that day, so we moved a few of them around and rebaited them, hoping for better results the next day. On the way back home it started snowing again, and by the time we got to our little ten foot Casita R.V. it was coming down about as fast as a fox-chased rabbit. Stashing our gear away quickly, we left the Casita and raced to the house: it was dinnertime. I don’t remember what we ate that day, but it was good. The tables were filled with plenty of food, people, and merriment. Whenever you have eighteen people together for a meal, you’re bound to have a good time, even if there isn’t a special occasion. Some might say that having eighteen people around the table for dinner is a special occasion in and of itself, but this was completely normal for our family. In fact, it was completely normal for both our families. Sharing a double-wide mobile home with another family comes with its challenges, chief among them being the fact that between the eighteen of us there was only one bathroom, but mealtimes were one of the things that more than made up for it. We ate, talked, and finished eating, and once the mess from dinner was all cleaned up, we kids goofed around until it was time to go bed. Zach and I headed out to our tiny little R.V. to bunk down for the night while everybody else drifted to their beds and off to sleep in the nice warm house. Meanwhile, our Casita was not exactly warm. As soon as we got inside we quickly shut the door and turned on the space heater to begin the arduous process of warming up our little space. After what seemed like ages, it was good enough that we could take our boots off, and, in due time, our coats, hats, and gloves as well. I crawled into my sleeping bag and drifted pleasantly off to sleep…

Bam! I felt the cold sting of a point-blank snowball crash into my face, yank me out of my dreams, and bring me screaming back to reality. “What was that for!?”

Zach just laughed. “Haha, got you good, didn’t I? Betcha didn’t see that coming!”

I glared at him while wiping the snow out of my face, and quickly discovered I needed to blow my nose. There was not a tissue, napkin, or piece of paper in sight, so I did what any decent human being would do: I jumped out of the Casita into the snow and blew my nose freestyle. As I did so, I landed on a hard rock underneath the fresh snow and my foot felt a dull pain. Annoyed, I climbed back into bed, still seething about Zach’s snowball attack. I tried to go back to sleep, but my foot started hurting more and more, and then it started throbbing. Finally, the pain became great enough that I decided to look at my foot and see what the matter was. How could a simple rock hurt that bad? As I brought my foot into view, I stared, horrified. There was a huge gash that ran along the base of three of my toes, and it looked pretty deep. There was enough blood to drown half a dozen gadflies. Then I realized that it wasn’t a rock I had landed on, but the pickaxe Zach had hastily ‘put away’ that got buried in snow. Suddenly the pain zipped up my nervous system and I was hurting. “This is bad,” I thought to myself, “real bad!” Without saying a word, I threw on a jacket and a boot, and jumped out the door. Zach thought I was still mad about the whole snowball thing. “Where are you going?” he shouted after me. I just yelled ‘inside’ and continued hopping to the back porch door, leaving bright red spots on the pure white snow in my wake.

It was around 10:30 or so when I interrupted the adults’ conversation by noisily hopping down the hallway and telling them I had an accident. As soon as I came into view my mother knew something was wrong, for she could see the trail I was making on the carpet and could hear my heavy breathing. Soon half the house was up and grimacing at the sight of me, or rather, my foot. My mother soon realized there wasn’t much that could be done: I’d just have to sit around the house until it healed. And so began my long painful journey. The next day found me sitting on the corner of our wrap-around couch with my foot propped up on the little green ottoman. And the next day found me in the same spot, and the next, and the next. I couldn’t walk, or run, or do any fun things at all. Everybody else would go outside for sledding and snowball fights, but I had to stay inside and rest my foot. I had to hop everywhere I went until we finally found some crutches. Well, it was actually just one crutch, so it was still difficult to move around, but it wasn’t as bad as no crutch at all.

The days slowly ticked by. I read every interesting book we owned, and then started in on the boring ones. I played far too many games of solitaire and kept up on my schoolwork, but that’s about it. I began to feel useless. There was no way to help, and I was less than helpful because people actually had to help me. As the winter pressed on, things became tenser as cabin fever set in. Eighteen people confined in a small double-wide gets claustrophobic pretty fast, and winter wasn’t helping. We were mostly snowed in, we couldn’t get to town to buy more food, and the pipes were frozen and we barely had any water. Things weren’t looking so great, and stress was oozing out of every crack and crevice of the house. And there wasn’t anything I could do about it. I couldn’t help the dads clear the driveway, or fill up our cistern with water, or anything. The moms and older daughters already did all the cooking, and I couldn’t really help clean the kitchen either. I was totally useless. I wanted to run and be free, I wanted to get out of that stuffy house, but I couldn’t. Everybody else got to go outside, run around, burn off some steam, and get away from the cramped quarters from time to time, but I had to stay one hundred percent immobile. Few things are more infuriating for a young boy of twelve or so, and it was hard to keep my bitterness in check. But I knew that nobody wants to be around a self-pitying sour kid, and if that’s who I was going to be it’d just make everybody miserable. So, happy I must be.

I did my best to be helpful around the house, but about all I could do was chop vegetables and pick the chicken off the bones. So, that’s what I did, and a lot of it. Then I started reading Dr. Seuss books to the littles kids, and before you knew it I was spending a several hours a day reading stories aloud to not just the little guys, but also the older kids as well. Next I asked our friends’ oldest daughter if she would teach me how to crochet. At first Kayla thought I was joking, but her eyes lit up when she found I was serious, and she was more than happy to show me. Pretty soon I was there crocheting away with the best of them. I started cracking jokes and making up stories to tell, and soon everybody loved being around me. I kept all the little kids busy most of the day, and things became less stressful for me and for everybody else.

Gradually, I came to realize the power I had gained. Whenever I was especially happy, the entire house seemed to be extra joyful, and whenever I was glum, everybody seemed to be more downcast and not exactly peaceful. And then it hit me: if I hadn’t been injured, there’s no way I would have come to have such influence among the children. With two healthy feet, I wouldn’t have spent so much time reading to everybody, playing with the little guys, or learning to crochet. I wouldn’t have been there to help keep things under control, and none of the mothers or older children would have ever gotten a break. It was then that I truly learned that God sometimes uses bad circumstances to bring about a great good. And sometimes, that good is simply making it through the winter in one piece.