Sunday, May 31, 2009

Cage Match

I left Greta and Bill's party at 10 PM which was probably an hour too late as I was so incredibly tired from working the sale at the greenhouse. Thankfully though, I left far more tired than intoxicated. I was too tired to drink, I guess. As I was driving home I was contemplating night lights and the pollution, noticing the row upon row of pot lights on the new houses beaming down from the eaves in the distance in the subdivision to the south of my home and thought it insane that these people find it necessary to make sure the world could see their glowing Potentilla borders around their newly constructed houses at night. I drove over the hill to our farm saw that there was yet another light on by the corn bins and I cursed my uncle for not realizing how ridiculous they are and not shutting them off. One yard light beams in my bedroom and I have to actually draw the shade every night to block out the cursed illumination.
 I pulled into my yard. Parking my car in the usual spot, I jumped out and headed to the back door of the house. I had completely forgotten that earlier in the day I had explicitly instructed Joe Anderson to place tomato cages he had so generously made for me, formed from concrete reinforcement fencing, "On the east side of the house, by the wood pile". I pancaked myself so hard, suddenly finding myself on the ground,  I didn't know what hit me and I was sort of in this disorienting tangle of sharp metal. Sharp,rusty metal that I felt collapse under the crush of my behemoth weight. I untangled myself from the mess of wire and stood up, shook it off and laughed at the karmic balance of cursing the light of night because I could have used some just then.
I got in the house and while readying the coffee maker for the morning I noticed sort of a stinging sensation from my right leg. I went into the bathroom and realized blood was flowing from about five puncture and scratch wounds around my knee area and then noticed a deeper gash around my ankle at which my sock was already tending to that wound soaking up copious amounts of blood. I got busy with the antibacterial soap and washed and washed the scrapes, frantically trying to remember the exact date of my last Tetanus shot. I remembered as a child, a cousin and I had a strange obsessive fear of blood poisoning and had many conversations about the red stripe of infection that creeps up your leg and if it gets to your heart, BANGO! you're dead!
I overly scrubbed the wounds, patted them dry, then applied hydrogen peroxide, smeared on triple antibiotic ointment and covered all the wounds with 6 extra large bandages, mainly to keep the blood off my sheets of my bed that I so yearned to crawl into, the bleeding wasn't stopping any too soon.

I got up this morning and went outside to survey the damage I had inflicted on the tomato cages and saw that I had flattened one nicely. I moved them up and closer to the wood pile, out of my way and as I did, one fell over and scratched me on the right ankle yet again! I am sort of feeling sorry for the tomatoes I will be placing in them later today.

1 comment:

Pam said...

I would have loved to see your tumble!
You are lucky that there is no cement there ....