The following was written by my late wife Elaine. She wrote a long book, a diary really, from which this is one passage:
A Winter Story: The Midwife
It was a beautiful, still, early December 1998 morning with 13 inches of new snow; the plows had not yet come around, and Dave went out to sweep off the car. Someone hollered, “Hellooooooooo” and he saw a young woman trudging up our driveway with her long black coat dragging in the snow. Dave was the first person she saw after her car slid off the road into a snow bank. She had already walked a quarter-mile through the deep snow. She called out that she was a midwife and was trying to get to a neighbor’s to deliver their baby. Dave waved her up to the house, and she called the the neighbors to let them know that he was going to bring her there in this 4-wheel drive truck. They made the plan that the next day, if all went well, Dave would go and get her and try to get her car pulled out of the snow bank.
The story has a good ending: The baby was fine, and after the neighbor called the next afternoon, Dave took them potato salad and pumpkin pie which I made for them, and he brought the midwife back to our house. While he was gone to pull her car up the driveway, we had a cup of coffee and she told me that everything had gone well, that she and the mom had crawled, walked, and danced during the labor; the baby, their second child, was just fine.
Hippies have unique ways of off-springing.
To be continued…
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About the Author: RD Blakeslee (1931 – 2024) built his net worth by only investing in that which can be enjoyed during acquisition and throughout life, as opposed to papers in a drawer, like stocks and bonds. You can read more about him here.
Photos: Courtesy of the Blakeslee Family
Thank you for sharing.
The kind gentle man Mr. Dave is missed.
Indeed, Bill.