Mother’s intuition saves family from certain tragedy Saturday, December 16, 2006 By TOM PAULSON P-I REPORTER The wind outside was howling, roaring, but Anne and Mark Steiner could still hear their 1-year-old daughter coughing in the next room of their small Lake City home. All of the Steiners had been sick and the power had been out for hours. It was just a few minutes after 1 a.m. on Friday, Anne Steiner recalled, when she got up and went into the children’s bedroom to check on Lillian. It’s a tiny room, painted in lavender with white trim, located at the northwest corner of the home. Andy Rogers / P-I Galen Looney, left, and Sean Hill, with the disaster restoration company Belfor, survey the damage after a 120-foot tall tree fell on the Steiner family’s home. Steiner snuck into the room, with a glance at 4-year-old Eve asleep on her bed, and went over to the crib where Lillian was having a fitful night. The kid-sized bed and the crib, separated by maybe a foot, consumed at least half of the available space in the room. Anne picked up her sniffling young one, left the kids’ room and crawled quietly back into bed with Mark. Perhaps Lillian would do better snuggled between her parents, she thought. In any case, she figured this way Eve could avoid being awakened by the baby’s coughing. "Five minutes later, the tree came down," Anne said. A massive Douglas fir in their backyard had been toppled by the high winds, smashing into the northwest corner of the home — a direct hit on the children’s room. The crib where Lillian had been just minutes earlier was now crushed. Mark Steiner plunged into the darkness and flung open the door of the children’s room to find an almost incomprehensible scene. The cozy bedroom had been cut in half and covered in wreckage — branches, nail-studded two-by-fours, insulation and asphalt roofing. Instead of the ceiling was a gaping hole revealing the wet and wind-whipped night. "I was calling out to her and Eve was screaming, ‘Where am I? Where am I?’ " Steiner said. He was relieved to hear her voice and began digging frantically through the debris to find her. Amazingly, Steiner said, he found Eve relatively unscathed under a pile of insulation — with a massive Douglas fir just to one side of her bed and a broken assemblage of ceiling-joist lumber stabbing down just to the other. "All she had was a little scratch on her forehead," he said. Later Friday, Steiner looked on while a crew with chain saws worked to clean up the wreckage. The tree also had clipped the corner of the home of their neighbors, John and Clara Davidson, smashing a window. The Davidsons, who have a few big trees of their own in their backyard, had moved with their three children into the basement when the storm came Thursday. They had paid to have two trees limbed to reduce the risk, but still felt it prudent to get below ground level. "I think we’re going to have the trees taken down after this," Clara said. The Steiners moved in with the Davidsons on Friday to ride out the rest of the storm, but will likely spend most of the holidays in a motel. "We don’t have any family in the area," said Mark Steiner, who has worked at Seattle’s iconic DVD and video store Scarecrow Video for decades. "I just hope to figure out how to still make this a good Christmas for the kids in spite of this." Added Anne, with a weary smile: "I just thank goodness for Lillian’s cough … It was only the difference of five minutes. Five minutes!" Her husband, wet and dirty from cleaning up, wiped his face and closed his eyes. When he opened them again, they were full of tears. "Every time I stop and think about it, I have a hard time not crying," he said. "I just can’t believe how lucky we were."
MORAL TO THE STORY::DON’T DEFY A MOTHER"S INTUITION
DEFINITIONS OF: INTUITION
Definition: A looking after; a regard to.
Definition: Direct apprehension or cognition; immediate knowledge, as in perception or consciousness; — distinguished from “mediate” knowledge, as in reasoning; as, the mind knows by intuition that black is not white, that a circle is not a square, that three are more than two, etc.; quick or ready insight or apprehension.
Definition: Any object or truth discerned by intuition.
Definition: Any quick insight, recognized immediately without a reasoning process; a belief arrived at unconsciously; — often it is based on extensive experience of a subject.
Definition: The ability to have insight into a matter without conscious thought; as, his chemical intuition allowed him to predict compound conformations without any conscious calculation; a mother’s intuition often tells her what is best for her child.
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