Grr-bump-grr-bump. Our tires hit the rumble strip. I jerked awake, straightened the wheel. Not quickly enough.
The car hit the guardrail. The scream of metal on metal. Then a sickening weightlessness as our world flipped, like we were on some terrifying amusement-park ride, hurtling toward our doom. This is it, I thought. I wouldn’t even live to see Christmas.
Then we came to a stop, still upside down. I turned to my husband, Bill, and saw him draw in deep, shaky breaths. Thank God! I’d nearly killed us, falling asleep at the wheel.
We were on the long drive home to Virginia after Thanksgiving with our daughter’s family in Massachusetts. The car was reduced to mangled steel and shattered glass. Only our seatbelts kept Bill and me from being thrown through the windshield.
My heart should have been hammering, but at that moment I felt a peace I’d never known. Almost as if I were being held close by God himself. Maybe it was just the blood rushing to my head.
“It’ll be okay,” a man said from outside the car. Through the punched-out windshield, I saw the feet of people huddled around. “EMTs are on the way.” Good Samaritans helped us from the car and kept us comfortable until the paramedics arrived.
Others gathered things that had been thrown from our vehicle—mostly dirty laundry. The car itself, which we’d bought used three years earlier, was a total loss. Still, I couldn’t shake that strange feeling of being held and protected. Shock, the EMTs would probably call it.
Yet tests and X-rays at the hospital showed that Bill and I had no major injuries. Mostly cuts and bruises. The staff patched us up and found us a hotel, where we stayed until our daughter and son-in-law arrived to help us get back to Virginia.
The day after we got home, I went through the bag of stuff collected from our car. The laundry, old documents from the glove box, a cracked ice scraper. My eyes fell on a small oval disk fastened to a short string of silver beads. That wasn’t ours!
I flipped it over. It was a Christmas ornament—depicting Joseph, Mary and an angel, praying over the Baby Jesus.
Left by our car’s previous owner? Maybe. But I think Someone knew Bill and I were the ones who would need to be held close and protected.
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