Member-only story
Spit and Hellfire
Or some unspoken history
As we sat at the table across from the associate principal and Special Ed Teacher three days ago and listened to them tell us about how our son scratched his teacher and spit on him while he was blocking him from exiting the room, my ex said “I don’t even know where he got that spitting thing from!” I agreed. “Yeah, I have no idea,” shrugging my shoulders and looking bewildered.
Later that day as I was driving to pick the kids up from school, a couple of memories popped into my head as I was replaying that scene.
The first time I drove in winter after we moved up to Northern Wisconsin, I managed to put our explorer in a ditch. That’s what I always say, but thinking about time, it’s all wrong. It had to be my second winter there. We moved there in May of 2006, I gave birth to our daughter the following year in August 2007. I was due any day with her when we bought the Explorer. I was newly pregnant with our third child in the winter of 2008, so it was actually my 3rd winter there, not even the second! It’s so much more dramatic when I say it’s my first though, so I will probably always tell the story that way.
I was confident in my winter driving skills as I had driven through many years of Iowa winters. I was also overly confident because our Explorer had four-wheel drive! That first snowfall of…
