I am clumsy. Not just a little clumsy, but a complete clutz. My parents should have never listened to my grandmother who said dancing was from the devil when I wanted to take ballet. I would have been so much more graceful If I had learned to dance… even with my heifer Scottish genes.
As my faithful readers are aware, I fell as a teenager and broke my coccyx, and eventually ended up with a plate in my lower back. Several years ago, I fell and broke a vertebrae in my back. Then last year, I broke my hip. And now at 65 years old, I have more metal in my body than a ’57 Chevy.
The hip breaking incident occurred in my bonus room that used to be a garage. We have a 650 square foot room that contains some junk, an unused treadmill, two bicycles, a small art studio, an old refrigerator that just won’t die, a huge set of bookshelves, some toys for the grandchildren, and their swim stuff. At the far end since a set of shelves that are used as a pantry. So quite often, I find myself going to my little grocery store in my garage to get a can of vegetables or staples.
I confess that right after I fell and broke my hip, that bonus room gave me the creeps. It seems like every time I went into that room, I came close to tripping on something or actually did trip. I felt like Satan was there just waiting to push me and break the other hip. It was obviously an unlucky and unholy room! Fed up, my husband forced me to get rid of a lot of junk that was blocking the area.
Having so much new space was awesome. I kept the grandchildren for a week and was able to store some of their playthings in the room. We had been to the pool, and I had purchased a giant heart-shaped float for my granddaughter. Pink on the bottom, the top of the float was clear and small metallic confetti circles in silver and gold rested inside the float. It was gaudy but she loved it.
After the children went back home, I tossed their swim things in a pile and forgot about them.
A week later, I decided to make some pasta. Of course, the large glass jar of tomato sauce and the penne noodles were in the bonus room on the pantry shelves. That meant I had to brave the creepy room to get what I needed.
Now I knew my husband did not want me going down there by myself because I’m a clutz, but I also knew that he had some place to go that evening and if I was going to have dinner ready in time, I had to get the supplies myself.
So off I went.
I grabbed the glass jar of tomato sauce and the box of noodles and turned to leave the room.
And that’s when it happened. I still don’t understand how, and I will probably never know, but all of a sudden, I found myself falling.
The first thought that popped in my head as I was going down was, “I’m going to break the other hip and my husband’s going to kill me.” The second thought was, “You better toss the jar so you won’t get cut by glass.”
The box of noodles went flying out of my hands, hit the floor, and burst open sending what seemed like thousands of noodles skidding everywhere.
I braced for an impact and tried to catch myself, but it was to no avail. I hit the floor. Or what I thought was the floor.
Instead of smacking my hip against the concrete, I found myself bouncing up and down.
Up and down, I bounced, and startled, I checked to see what I had landed on. It was my granddaughter’s heart-shaped pool float. As I bounced, gold and silver confetti discs inside the float bounced with me. It was almost like a celebration.
I rolled over onto my knees to get out of the float, but for a good long while my rear end was stuck in the hollowed-out center. Pushing and shoving, I removed the float and searched for my jar of tomato sauce. I just knew there was a nasty mess somewhere on the floor.
But instead, after searching, I found that when I tossed the tomato sauce, the jar had landed in a basket of odds and ends nearby. It wasn’t damaged at all.
I wasn’t going to tell my husband about this episode, but he figured it out when he went into the bonus room and pasta noodles crunched under his feet. I have since been forbidden to enter the bonus room.
I guess he’s right. I don’t have a lot of luck in that room. But what an amazing experience! For one heart-stopping moment, my fall was stopped by a heart!
