The coldest night of January, I drove 115 miles through a North Dakota blizzard because my eighty-two-year-old mother had stopped answering her phone. My husband was working overnight with the county snowplows, so I made the trip alone, praying she was simply asleep in her favorite recliner. But when I finally reached our old family farmhouse, something felt terribly wrong. The furnace was silent, the kitchen was freezing, and frost covered the windows from the inside. I found Mom asleep in Dad’s old brown recliner, wearing her winter coat, a knitted hat, and gloves, with Grandma’s crocheted blanket pulled over her legs. The thermometer read just fifty-one degrees.

She was alive, but barely comfortable enough to sleep. I checked the thermostat, then hurried outside to inspect the enormous white propane tank beside the house. Its gauge showed only five percent. My heart sank. At that temperature, the furnace could stop working completely, and my mother was already living in dangerous cold. I knew we needed help immediately, but before I could do anything else, I discovered a pink delivery receipt on the refrigerator. It showed that my older sister, Pam, had ordered only 200 gallons of propane in October, even though the four of us had each contributed $250 for Mom’s winter heating. There had been no December delivery. I couldn’t understand where the money had gone, or why Pam had allowed things to get this bad. Then Mom woke up, grabbed my wrist, and whispered something I never expected to hear: “Don’t you start with your sister. She’s got enough going on.”..CONTINUE READING