Mom, a Chain Saw, and 911…..

Mom Snow (aka mom, Cathy’s mom, Faye, the Fayester) was always a tough and smart woman. I guess I’d known that since way back in the 1970s when Cathy and I first started dating. I didn’t realize how tough though, until one day in the early 2000s when we got a phone call from mom, letting us know she was alright.

Mom had moved from Illinois back to Alabama several years earlier and built her dream house on ten acres. After building the house, she started clearing some of the woods to make trails and build her beloved gardens. In the course of the clearing, a lot of oak trees came down, and these eventually became firewood for her wood stove.

Well, one year when she was about 70, she and her neighbor, Doc (who was a retired chiropractor and a few years older than she was) were cutting up some of the wood. Doc was using the chainsaw, while mom was holding the wood in place. Suddenly the chainsaw hit a knot and kicked back. In the process, it snagged mom’s sweatshirt and pulled her into the spinning chainsaw, which proceeded to slice her arm open.  

Doc stopped the chainsaw and set it down, and started running around the house. Mom called out “Doc, what are you doing?”. Doc answered back “Looking for a phone book to call the hospital!”. Mom back to him – “DOC! DIAL 9-1-1!” That stopped Doc from running, and he quickly went to the phone and called. He went back to mom, and helped her keep pressure on the wound. A short time later the ambulance arrived, and took her to the hospital, where she received 22 stitches in her arm. It was after that, that she called to let us know that she was alright, that she’d only sliced her arm open while chainsawing some wood…..

We laughed about the story later, and retold it whenever the family was together. Then, a year or so after mom passed away, the story came full circle. One evening at the farm, I was in our garage and was bitten in the foot by a copperhead. I was in the garage cursing and yelling, and Cath came to the back door. – “What’s wrong?!” Me back to her – “A F@$&#}! Copperhead just bit me!” Cathy, started thinking “what do I do? What do I do?”, when she heard her mom’s voice, clear as a bell, say “CATHY! DIAL 911!”, which she quickly did. The ambulance got there, and took me to Warrenton, where they administered the anti-venom, and I was OK (although I had an extremely swollen and sore foot and leg for awhile).

Yep, mom was a tough lady, and her toughness stood out when a crisis was pending. She stayed calm and helped herself when Doc was panicking, and kept Cath calm a few years later when I had my own incident…..