Danger Avoided!

Olivia was a single mother with two small children, ages seven and five.  It was the day after Christmas, and all three were extremely tired.  “My children were taking a nap and I was napping too, in our small upstairs bedrooms,” Olivia says.  “The children knew to wake me when they got up and they always did, or I would hear them stirring and awaken before they got out of bed.”  On this day, however, the children got up and quietly tiptoed downstairs without alerting their mother. Olivia slumbered on.

The children were playing near the front door when the doorbell rang.  They knew never to open the door without Olivia right there, so her daughter came upstairs.  “Mommy!” she called as she climbed.  “The doorbell’s ringing.” 

Slowly Olivia opened her eyes. “The moment that I awakened, I realized the whole house was filled with natural gas!” she says.  “I jumped out of bed, ran downstairs and opened the door to get my children outside.  At the door was the woman who had rung the doorbell.”

Panicky, Olivia grabbed the children’s coats and pushed them out the door, with a grateful glance at the woman.  Olivia had never seen her in the neighborhood before.  Strangely, she seemed rather calm and was commenting on another neighbor.  “I walk by her house all the time, and have been noticing that her newspapers are piling up,” the stranger told Olivia.  “Perhaps you should check on her.”

“Instead, I was foolishly going back in the house to find the problem, which I did,” says Olivia.  “Our gas heater had malfunctioned, the pilot had gone out and the automatic shut off hadn't worked.  I was able to shut it completely off and air out the house.”  During this confusion, the lady disappeared.

If Olivia’s children hadn’t sneaked downstairs to play alone that day, no one would have heard the bell, and all three might have been overcome by the dangerous fumes. For the next several months, Olivia looked for the woman, to thank her---and to ask her why she happened to ring Olivia’s bell. “Although I was outside a great deal with my children, I never saw her again.”  Nor did Olivia come across a neighbor with newspapers piling up.

Could this have been just an excuse to ring the doorbell?  Perhaps we’ll never know for sure.  But “I feel sure she was our guardian angel,” Olivia says today, “and I am forever grateful.”

(C) 2005  Joan Wester Anderson  www.joanwanderson.com

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