An Anvil Fell On Me

Okay. So when was the last time you heard of someone getting hit in the face with a rake?

Doesn't it just have the ring of "retro" to it? Like, you can imagine Dagwood Bumstead or Foghorn Leghorn or even perhaps someone on the Sgt. Bilko show getting smashed in the face with a rake. You generally don't equate someone as trendy and happenin' as my good self with Getting Smashed In The Face With a Rake. It's so very Looney Tunes, and so very NOT Haggis harmony.

Yeah.

So, you'll never guess what happened to me today! Guess! Go on! Guess! Need a clue?! I will say only that it involved my face and a rake.

No kidding. I was in my Mama Bear mode, storing provisions for winter to avoid being out of rock salt or whatever when the first blizzard hits (and here in DC, by blizzard I mean "the first three inches of snow"), weatherproofing the house to reduce the insane energy costs that await around the corner, cruelly cutting back the rose bushes so that they'll grow fantastically next season, and finally and at long last putting into action my Martha Stewart-inspired laundry/mud room action plan.

That's right folks. The laundry room is now a bona-fide, Martha-approved "Home Haberdashery Center" where you can hang shirts, sew buttons, and find castile soap and spray starch easily. It's so fantastic that those of you who know me know that I will now thoroughly enjoy the 16.3 minutes I spend in it annually. And that I am, as we speak, googling "castile soap" to figure out what the hell it's for...

Regardless, the room's previous incarnation was as Catch-All Dumping Ground for Anything That Doesn't Go Anywhere Else. Among those items, which included a bike, Super Lawn Weed and Seed, a green watering can, and one year's worth of that fuzzy stuff that comes out of the dryer...was one old-school (wooden with really heavy metal tines) rake. A rake which I moved out of the way so I could bound energetically out the door into the yard where I could cruelly prune the roses in the name of loving roses, a rake which, once out of the way, suddenly found itself IN the way as I, seemingly in slow motion, stepped on the perpendicular row of tines and...

WHAM!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Got a face full of old-school rake.

I've never had a concussion before, but I think I know what it is. I literally saw stars. Couldn't momentarily answer the question, "oh my god are you okay?!" with anything but "I don't know." Looked in the mirror (a lovely and necessary feature of any classy haberdashery center, don't you think?), saw that it had hit my left temple and thankfully not my eye orbitals or my prodigious proboscis, and then FREAKED OUT. My latest blood counts were good enough for government work. Except my platelets. The things that clot your blood and ensure you don't bleed to death. Yeah, mine were low enough to elicit that Furrowed Doctor Brow that NOBODY wants to see on an otherwise sunshiney day. So the Baby Daddy says, "Don't worry; you're not bleeding" to which I barked, "Yeah! Not out of my skin! What if my skull bleeds out?!" To which he, characteristically, mellowly said, "You'll be fine." Which I know was meant to tell me that I'll be fine but in reality just pissed me off.

As I stormed up the stairs to get an ice pack to stem the certain brain stem bleeding that was absolutely, positively going on in my skull, I was so mad at him for so minimizing my fear by daring to be so calm when I have just been SMASHED IN THE FACE WITH A F****NG RAKE!! With only 15,000 platelets on the freakin' job no less!! How could he still be down there and not be up here performing life-saving brain surgery on me!?? What a total jerk!!

And then I realized as I finally got a few moments of a frozen package of edamame on the wound, that I wasn't really scared to be bleeding out through the ears, wasn't really mad because he had the temerity to reassure me of my well-being in a moment of crisis, wasn't really mad that some stupid f'ing moron had left a rake where a well-meaning, cute and otherwise jolly girl could step on it. Nope. I was mad because I had just crossed that line between tragedy and comedy where I could never tell the story about The Day I Thought I'd Bleed to Death (oh you poor dear!) without having to also admit that I, oh cool and collected and hipster I, had joined the ranks of Wile E. Coyote, Gomer Pyle and dare I say the trifecta of Larry, Curly and Moe as the self-inflicter of Garden Tool Injury.

Yep, the story had all the makings of a real Katherine Hepburn drama in which I would star, but alas I would instead have to settle for being an extra on I Love Lucy. Or, worse, a blog post on StarSpangledHaggis.