Everyday Canvas

Reckless!

Prompt: write about a physical injury you or someone close to you had and how it made you feel.

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One of my sons used to be impulsive, reckless, and yet clumsy. Usually, he landed on his feet, but there was this time when he decided to climb a huge oak tree in the backyard with reachable branches much higher from the ground.

I have no inkling why or how the idea hit him. He must have picked up a string--yes, a roll of string, not rope. He must have thrown it over the lowest branch which was about 15-20 feet from the ground. Holding on to the string, he must have tried to climb the darn tree.

He wasn’t a small kid at the time either. He was in his early teens. I didn’t know what he was up to, as a few minutes earlier, he was practicing his baseball pitch. There was a lull in the sound of his pitching, but I didn’t make much of it. We had a two-acre yard, then. I thought he was walking around or something. So, I kept busy in the kitchen. From the open window, I heard a big thud. I stepped out to the yard and spotted him walking toward me. His face had lost its color, and he was holding his left arm with his right hand. There was no blood, but from the looks of the arm, I immediately knew the bone was broken.

My first thought was that he slipped and fell down while walking about. He had slipped and fallen down, all right, but up from the tree because the string had broken. Now, who’d climb that tree with the use of a flimsy string!

I was upset, angry, and mostly in panic mode, and I was feeling like I was about to throw up. Just then, my husband came home, my knight in shining armor, and we took him to the ER. They set the bone there and put his arm in a cast.

For weeks after that, I worried that the arm wouldn’t set right. Luckily, it healed with no scar or disability.

People say, boys will be boys, but can’t they be boys without giving their parents so much crap?

He is fifty years old now, and as I write this, I still feel nervous.