My great-grandmother lived to be a very old woman, eighty-nine years old in fact, but that long life was only because of a few precious minutes fifty years earlier. Those minutes made the difference between her having fifty more years on earth or her dying prematurely as a woman in the prime of life. I wonder how often in those last fifty years she thought back to those few minutes that saved her life.
Petronella was her name and, from everything I heard about her, she was a loving and lovely person. Like so many other pioneer women, she was hard-working and hardy, good to the core and generous, steadfast and strong. I’ve heard enough stories about her from my grandmother to know I’m telling the truth here. She was born in 1851 in De Pere, Wisconsin to parents who had immigrated from Germany. De Pere had been founded two hundred years before and today is part of the Green Bay cosmopolitan area.
At twenty years of age, she would marry a young immigrant from Germany, the twenty-eight-year old Bernard Wilde, who had been in America for about seven years. They met in De Pere, Wisconsin, where so many immigrant families called home. In time, they would have twelve children, the first three born right there in Wisconsin, the last nine born in Nebraska. The Omaha, Nioborara and Black Hill Railroad was extended to Humphrey in 1880, but the Wilde’s had moved there around 1876. At any rate, open lands were available for farming. It was near Humphrey in Platte County Nebraska where this story I’m telling takes place. It would have been, I believe, in the late 1880’s or early 1890’s when Grandma Kuehler was a small child.
As told to me, Grandma Wilde (I’ll call her what her grandchildren called her) was a woman of strong faith and who practiced that faith. Likely that faith had been fostered at St Francis Church back in De Pere, Wisconsin when she was a child. Time would show it was a tenacious faith that stayed true through any tempest that threatened her. As a good Catholic, Grandma Wilde believed in going to church each Sunday. However, in Platte County, Nebraska, that was not an easy obligation to fulfill. The nearest Catholic church was several miles away, maybe as many as seven, from their homestead, if memory serves me here. Still, Grandma Wilde didn’t let the miles stand in the way of her attending Sunday Mass.
Grandma Wilde had small children at home who could not walk the miles with her. My own grandmother told me that her mom would give each of the small children still at home a tablespoon of sugar at their place at the table before she left for church. The children would be allowed to eat the sugar–a rare treat in those days–while their mother was away. It was a clever way of keeping the children occupied while she was gone. And, as Grandma told me the story, that tablespoon of sugar would last each of the small children until their mom returned. It is difficult to imagine today’s child being equally excited about a spoonful of sugar and surely less able to postpone gratification long enough for the spoon to last several hours.
So, Grandma Wilde set out for church on that early Sunday morning as she had done other times. She went to church and was on her way back home when a blizzard blew through. It seems unlikely that she knew such a storm was coming, but instead was caught by surprise. She trudged onward, fighting the snow that blinded her way, steeling herself against the cold. As so often happened in that time and still happens today, she became disoriented and unsure of the direction she was supposed to go. And she grew tired as well from the conditions. She saw a tree nearby and she went to sit down below it for a while. Surely that was a mistake. Probably the cold already had dulled her senses and lulled her into thinking she should rest.
Meanwhile her husband, Bernard, along with their older sons, realized that she was in danger. Back at the farm, they saw the storm coming and soon enough they faced the snow swirling around them. As quickly as they could, they set out as a small search party to find her. It is difficult for us to imagine, I think, the trepidation and fear that chilled their bones as much or more than the snow that blew against them. Still, they knew they must find her. As my grandma told the story to me, I myself sat paralyzed, fearful of the same end that these men imagined for Petronella, wife and mother to these men. Would they find her in time to save her? Would they see her beneath that tree, soon to doze off into a sleep that she would not awake from, as the blizzard stole every bit of warmth from her body? I feared the answers to these questions as I sat on my grandmother’s lap and listened to her tell of her mom lost in the snow.
Perhaps God showed special mercy to this steadfast woman who had spent time with him that morning in church. Perhaps he looked upon those small children around the kitchen table back at home with their spoon of sugar as they awaited their mother’s return and he could not take from them something even more precious than that sweetness in the spoon. Grandma Wilde, for her part, always saw the hand of God in the story because she was found just minutes before she would have died from the exposure.
Not that it was easy to find her, by any means. In fact, the men were on the point of despair, coming to realize that they were not going to find her in time, when one of them thought he saw something beneath a nearby tree. She was on the opposite side from his sight, but he believed he could spy something still, maybe a shadow of something. No doubt by this point her body was covered in snow, making it more difficult to see much of anything. He went over to the tree and there he found the grouched body of Petronella.
The men hurriedly shook her and brought her back to consciousness. They did all they could to warm her body. And, thanks be to God, they had found her just in time. A few more minutes, they said, and she would have been gone. Her life was saved in the nick of time. That now obsolete word, nick, once meant at the critical moment. It describes best those circumstances that Petronella faced in the blizzard as her husband and sons searched desperately for any sign of her along the way that she had taken to get to church that Sunday morning.
She survived to tell the harrowing story, always sure to say God had saved her by showing the men a way through the snow to her sleeping body beneath that tree, so much like Elijah who fell asleep beneath the broom tree so sure he would die, but who was awakened by an angel who restored him to life. On that Sunday in Platte County, Nebraska, God dispatched angels once again to seek out and to save someone special to him, this time a saintly woman who had put God before her own safety. The name of the Church that she had attended that Sunday was St. Mary of the Angels. It surely was not a coincidence.
In later years, Petronella was no less the same stalwart saintly soldier. In 1920 and almost thirty years after the snowstorm in Platte County, Wisconsin, now she and Bernard made their home in Knox County, Texas. Here they had lived for the last two decades and now it was time for both of them to put down their workload and to rest. Bernard was nearly eighty years of age and Petronella was nearing seventy years of age. They divided the farm among three of their children and they moved to a house in the nearby community of Rhineland. The one thing Petronella required of their new place was that it would be close enough to the church so that she could walk to morning Mass. Seventy years old and she still was determined to make those steps to the house of God, even if her legs were less strong and she needed a cane in her hand to support her. That desire was granted her and so she walked the distance from her home. In her final years, when walking was no longer possible, a son-in-law would bring her in his car each morning. He would wait at the local store for Mass to end and then he would return to pick her up and take her home.
Of David, dearer to God than near anyone else in Biblical history, it is said he spoke these words on the occasion of seeing the Temple in Jerusalem, “I rejoiced when they said to me, ‘Let us go to the house of the Lord. And now our feet are standing within your gates, Jerusalem.” We can say Petronella shared David’s joy each time she stepped into the house of the Lord, that much is certain, and it is surely as certain that she can say with him, “And now my feet are standing within your gates, O heavenly Jerusalem.”
As once before, even now her Savior had brought her safely through the storm.
— Jeremy Myers
Sunday Brunch 