accidents

On the bridge, just where the skyline of St. Paul comes into view and you can see both the railroad tracks and the river undulating beneath you, we nearly had a car wreck. Honk, swerve, and it was back to normal rush hour. Still, the few milliseconds of disaster haunt me.

Sept. 2. I was driving home from work. Less than a block away, I had stopped at an intersection waiting to turn left and was rear-ended by a car going 50 mph. It was after the crash of glass, the vertigo of spinning had stopped, and they turned off the car radio, when I started to feel the panic. I was nine months pregnant and Laura wasn't moving. Nothing in my entire life has been more horrific than sitting on a curb and waiting desperately to feel her kick. I had to wait three hours before we knew she was ok. Then I spent another day in the hospital, hooked up to two heart monitors. It's good that I was pregnant at the time. There's no way a child in the backseat would have survived. Through the whole accident and ambulence ride, I never cried. But when we stopped by the junkyard several days later to officially declare the vehicle totalled, I touched the crumpled metal frame and sobbed.

It's hard to write about. I don't think catastrophes are fated, and I don't think our survival had a greater purpose. I just think I was lucky.