Tara and Tracey

Johnston, Rhode Island

Being it's our thirtieth birthday today, my twin sister and I just wanted to share our story from the Blizzard of '78 with you. As everyone knows, there was snow everywhere and Rhode Island was, for all intents and purposes, closed for a week. Well, our mother was immensely pregnant with us as we were originally due to be born in late March or so. As it turned out, we decided to come early. Our father was plowing snow at the time, and according to what we were told, when our mother went into labor (about eight weeks early), they managed to contact him to tell him that his snowed-in wife was in labor and needed to get to the hospital. Our father, God bless him, managed to get to her, and plowed the way for the ambulance to get us to Kent County Memorial Hospital where we were born. Due to complications from being born so early and weighing just about three pounds each, we were then airlifted in incubators by the National Guard to Women and Infants' Hospital where we later stayed, I believe, until our original due date. So in just hours of our birth we got quite the welcome into the world and truly have an appreciation as to the lengths that not only servicemen, but emergency personnel and our own parents, went through to make sure we arrived as safely and healthily as possible.

Received via email, February 11, 2008.