You know how cats, caught up in something suddenly out of their control like skidding across a newly-waxed floor, will at the end feign perfect poise and studiously lick their front paw as if to claim they meant to do that?
There’s this one scruffy bit of tree-wannabe I’d wanted gone for a long time, we all had but nobody had ever quite gotten around to it. It split into two branches slightly overhanging the neighbor’s yard between their orange tree and their garden.
Never a good thing to shade away someone else’s fruit to any degree, even if there wasn’t much to the thing. I hadn’t talked another neighbor into taking down her battered kitschy Snoopy with the broken windmill arm that she’d put on the shared fence and was shading one of my peaches slightly, but it gave me incentive not to be that neighbor.
Pride goeth…
Those two branches were thick but I finally decided I could at least give it a try. I could have mentioned my resolve to my tall strong husband, but thought, nah, he’s busy with something. Got out there with my aging clippers held straight over my head, got a good grip on the smaller branch, looked like I might actually be able to cut through this thing after all, I was putting everything into it–
–when the trunk that I didn’t know was rotten suddenly gave way at the bottom. I was flipped over backwards, hard.
There were two thick tree roots running in tandem above the ground and my spine exactly lined up with them. Richard happened to look out in time to see the end of the fall and, he said, my head bouncing back up again.
Knocked the wind out of me.
And maybe the sense. Ah my, the perfect poise moment. Part of me was able to think, I really shouldn’t be lying here with the sun on my face. The UV rating was 1 out of 16 before I headed outside but that’s still a 1 and I really ought to get up and inside now.
Willing myself to move just wasn’t getting it to happen.
It’s quite peaceful on this fine evening, looking up at that blue sky and all those green leaves.
Richard, rushing out the door, reached me by that point, wanting that not to have just happened, wanting to help, and the back-to-reality of having my sweet husband within view helped me focus.
There was the wry thought as he helped me carefully up, of, and *tomorrow* I’m supposed to have that injection for my med-induced osteoporosis.
He got me icepacks and I wondered what would complain the most later vs right then. The answer so far is the right shoulder, holding up the heavy clippers that had twisted downwards and then missed me (ohthankyouthankyou). At least we know we did what we could for it. So far I seem to have gotten off really easy, all things considering.
The squirrel escalator at the side of the fence got it way worse than I did.
So glad Richard was there.
Next time I might, y’know, tell him first what I was up to so he could volunteer to go do it himself. He certainly would have.