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Just a Pinched Ear?
Aaron Engstrom watched his rambunctious son, Carter, and a pack of his nephews run laughing through the house, bouncing off one another like bumper cars. They'd stuffed pillows inside their shirts and were "belly bashing."October mornings like this, with ice forming in the shallows of the Yellowstone River and the trees changing and the laughter inside the house -- that's why he moved back to the area where he'd grown up and settled in the small town of Sidney, Montana.
A few months earlier, Aaron and his wife, Annie, had left Bellingham, Washington, where he'd been taking pre-med classes and working as a tech at a busy Level II trauma center. Seeing the long hours doctors put in and looking ahead to years of school, he began to have second thoughts about his career. So when an opportunity to enter a new radiology program at the Sidney Health Center opened, he jumped at it.
Aaron smiled at the boys roughhousing in the living room. A thump to Carter's pillowed belly sent him tumbling backward into the corner of the maple TV stand. Carter covered his ear with his hand and cried.
"You okay, buddy?" Aaron asked, checking him over. There was no break in the skin. Carter, his eyes still full of tears, nodded, rubbed the sting away, tucked the pillow back in his shirt and ran off after his cousins.
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