A Love Story with a Little Heartbreak
Page 38
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Penny wouldn’t stop barking. Her excitement was too much for her compact cocker spaniel frame to contain. She jumped onto Connie’s bed and then down to the floor, repeating the frenzy of leaping over and over again from bed to floor and from floor to bed, pausing long enough at each u-turn to spin in a circle like a dervish-crazed dog each time she landed on a different surface. The two bedroom windows in this corner room were wide open, inviting the fresh June air into the room. It occurred to Connie that Penny might actually jump through one of them, so crazed was she in her behavior.
Penny was barking at Connie the whole time. It was the first time that Connie had stood up on her own—two feet away from the wheelchair—and tried to walk. Connie’s presence in this fully vertical posture was something new to Penny and so strange that it rousted the poor dog into a reaction that Connie hadn’t anticipated. Penny’s barking continued unabated as Connie took slow and careful steps from the bed to her bureau, which was six feet away. One minute and twelve very small steps later, Connie stood at her dressing bureau, her palms planted squarely on its surface, and looked into the mirror at the triumphant expression on her face.
“I did it,” she declared to herself, “I can walk!”
Penny wouldn’t stop barking, which is what drew Ruby to Connie’s bedroom. Ruby burst into the room, not knowing what to expect, fearful that something awful had happened to Connie. “Connie!” Ruby cried out when she saw her daughter standing in front of the bureau. She froze in surprise, not sure that she could believe her eyes.
Connie turned to her. “Mama! I can walk! Look, I can walk!” she cried out as tears of joy appeared in her eyes. She had done what the doctors had said she’d probably never do. They had prepared her for the worst, but she’d never lost sight of her goal.
Ruby and Connie went to each other in two steps and hugged in an embrace of such strong emotions that, for a second, it was difficult for either one of them to breathe. They both sobbed with unbounded happiness in a mutual love that mothers feel for their daughters and daughters feel for their mothers, a profound belief in the power of a kind of nurturing love that maternalism gives wings to, all this while Penny stood on her hind legs, determined to get between the two of them! It was undeniably and indescribably an exciting moment for all three of them!
Connie’s separation from her wheelchair happened almost immediately. A day later, it was designated obsolete and removed from the house, vanquished by Henry to St. Agnes’s inventory in exchange for some crutches. Full feeling had returned to both of her legs, and a year of soulful commitment, determination in the face of pain, and therapeutic exercise had given her the muscle and bone strength to take those first steps. There was still a ways to go, and walking didn’t come easily because fatigue would set in quickly, but over the following weeks, with the help of crutches, the fatigue gradually lessened. Connie’s bone and muscle mass had returned, and by the end of summer, the need for crutches was greatly diminished.
On September 4th, 1948, the crutches were no longer necessary and they were relegated to a corner under the basement steps of the house on Main Street in Chilton, Wisconsin.
For the next four months, Connie’s rehabilitation continued along with numerous cosmetic and dental surgeries. Of course, her physical therapy continued with weights, but the long walks through the quiet little town of Chilton were what helped her the most. Her right leg had fully recovered, but her left leg still hurt with a pain that was so deep that she couldn’t exactly locate its source. It didn’t take much of a walk to remind her that her recovery in that leg was not and probably would never be one hundred percent.
She also had a lot of healing to do emotionally. In many ways, that healing was the slowest, as those wounds were perhaps the deepest and might never completely heal. She thought of Carl often, mostly when she was in bed late at night, while she laid awake several hours after Ruby and Henry had fallen asleep. She’d stare at the blackness of the ceiling, remembering a lifetime that no longer seemed to have been hers, with Penny snoring in the middle of the bed, often butted sideways against her hips. Penny snored, and in a funny way, it reminded Connie of Carl. He didn’t snore really, but Penny’s heavy breathing and sudden snorts sometimes woke Connie up out of her dreams, and for a millionth of a second, she thought it was Carl’s breathing that she had heard. With time, fewer tears in the darkness would run down her face, until at some point, they would cease, and sleep would once again take over. Time heals all.
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