Trees

After a week and a half of the flu, I think I might have a moment to post, so here goes...

Shlya was tagged again to write six things about herself, then tagged several of us other bloggers as well. It has been fun to read what people want others to know about themselves. I was in bed the other night with ringing in my ears and a headache, and not sleeping, so I began thinking about what I would blog about myself. I don't know how far I'll get. Usually there is a story that goes with something, and really, I just want to tell this story.

1. I like to climb trees. I always have. We had some wonderful climbing trees in our yard growing up. The easiest, we called the Charlie Tree. I don't know why. My brothers probably know. My favorite was a sycamore tree. It was fairly tall, but it wasn't old enough to have limbs out of reach, and thankfully, my parents weren't into 'limbing up' trees, so I could climb it at a young age. By the time I was 7 or 8, I would climb it to the very top until I felt like the spindly branches would no longer appreciate my weight. I would enjoy swaying with the treetop in the nearly constant Nebraska wind. This would, of course, make my mother nervouse, but (bless her) she never forced me to come down.

I never fell out of a tree until I was 26 years old. (I do remember trying to fall out and break my leg because I thought a cast and crutches would be cool. But like Kohana, I never had any broken bones or trips to the hospital for stitches.)

The year Chris and I were married, we hosted a Christmas party at our home. I thought it would be a good idea to try to find some mistle toe to hang in a doorway somewhere to see who would take advantage of it. I set off to Belmont campus where Chris knew of a few climbable trees that sported some toe.

It was evening and rather warm for December, a slight mist in the air. I crawled under a fence in one of the housing areas and found a tree that looked promising. The lowest limbs were out of my reach, so I pulled a picnic table underneath to give me a boost. There were a few sprouts of mistle toe here and there in the crooks by the trunk, but nothing that was big enough. Looking up, I saw saw there might be some further up and out. I climbed up a little, and then started making my way out onto a limb. It was the sort of limb you could walk down while holding onto a higher branch.

About seven or eight feet out there was a nice clump that looked like it might be within my reach. I started to stretch for it thinking, 'If Chris saw me, he would kill me.' The next thing that happened I can only imagine looked like something out of Looney Tunes.

The mist of the evening had made the branches a bit slippery, so I slipped. Somehow I managed to grab the branch my feet had been on as I fell. I hung there for half a second, then my hands slipped off. Beneath me was another branch that I managed to grab... but of course my hands slipped off again. This time, there was nothing between me and the ground. Thankfully, the ground sloped steeply away from the base of the tree on that side, and somehow, that slope helped to break my fall. I walked away with only a slight bruised tailbone, but a terribly bruised ego.