My Newest Gash: The Latest in the Autumn Lost Skin Saga

Since the last wound on my knee has healed nicely from my encounter with the hiking trail on the way to Sarah’s school, it was about time for me to commit a new clumsy act. This afternoon I was enjoying the perfect 50 degree weather, the warm orange light filtering down through the bare tree branches, and my crazy children amusing themselves for gargantuan quantities of time by rolling down the slope in our front yard on their bellies. I was raking up leaves to place in the green yard waste garbage can. The Banana was watching from the confines of her stroller, since whenever I’d let her down she’d quickly take off for areas of the yard that were not visible from my vantage point.

I was pushing the 65 gallon garbage cart to the next pile of leaves, watching a late afternoon school bus pull up to the corner, listening to my children happily squeal as they tumbled around and around on the ground, when, suddenly, and I have no idea how this even happened, I managed to trip on the garbage can and fall INTO it as it crashed to the ground so that all the skin from the top of my right shoulder down to below my clavicle was scraped off.

There I was, sprawled out on my stomach, my head buried in leaves inside the garbage can, in serious, serious pain. Scraping off several layers of skin can make a grown up Mama cry. Ouch.

It was the CRAZIEST thing! I’m sure that if any of my neighbors actually saw the action, they were thinking, “What???!!???” I felt sooooooo ridiculous. Mr. Sneaky Pants gave me lots of hugs to help me “heal better.” And that was nice.