It needs a bird, but none of them cooperated.
Yesterday, I stayed home from a Sisters in Crime meeting because my husband, Handy Harry Homeowner, meant to spare me the noise and commotion of fixing the deck. He’d arranged to do the loud work while I was away for the morning. Ever-confident, he planned to surgically remove a ruined plank from the back deck using an electric saw to dismember the plank instead of prying it out. Handy Homeowners of greater-than-spring-chicken-age need to work smarter, not harder.
I meant to attend our Border Crimes chapter first-Saturday-of-the-month meeting. However, while scrambling to eat my eggs, the maniacal whine of the saw taunted me. I tensed when it slowed to a growl as it bit into the plank’s thickness. My mind, fiction-trained through years of reading how-to-write books (conflict! conflict! conflict!) and conditioned to think of fictional disasters with which to plague characters, could imagine Chekhov’s saw. Don’t show the weapon if you’re not going to use it. One slip and blood would be everywhere. With Handy Harry home alone, I couldn’t chance it. So I stayed.
For an hour, the saw screamed at the plank as if taking revenge for insults to its mother. Handy Harry pulled and pounded with the crowbar — no bit of decking would defeat him. Plank body parts accumulated on the top rail of the deck with rusty nails protruding from them like dragon’s teeth. They looked as if they were waiting to sink into the pink flesh of a carelessly-placed hand. A gap between the remaining planks lay in wait for just one misstep, just one. Sipping tea while working on a story draft (conflict!), I remained watchful.
After Harry had the plank pieces out, of course I needed to create a photo-documentary of his work — that’s how we keep track of which home repairs have happened, and when. Carrying my small camera for the snapshots, I opened the porch door as I’ve done thousands of times over the years. I stepped out, my mind on lens and shutter settings. My foot hit the doormat and, quicker than thought, my left leg shot forward. My right leg remained planted inside the doorway but didn’t support me and bent. My right knee slammed into the porch planks. The doormat had slid when I stepped on it.
(Why is it always the knees? Why? Ever since high school basketball, it’s been the _knees_.)
Harry was engrossed. He noticed nothing. I’d have thought that me cannonballing into the wooden porch would generate a significant boom, but Harry has laser-focus. I wanted tea and sympathy and cries of oh-my-poor-dear, if not a call to 911, but if I sat there in the open door I knew a cat, or two or three, was bound to amble out to the screened-porch. Seeing me-on-the-floor, and being clever, they’d know I couldn’t run interference. The open door would beckon and he, she, or they, would make a break. Waiting for the unlikely event of spousal concern, probably couched as, “What the hell are you doing down there?”, or the likely event of a cat escape that would have me limping after a frisky feline in an OJ Simpson/Bronco highway chase around the backyard, left me with no choice. I had to get up — but not before I took a picture.
Beware the treachery of doormats.
I’d have dressed better if I’d known I’d be blog-worthy.
As a result of the porch-capades, I’m the bearer of a silver-dollar-sized scrape & bruise on my previously-not-injured knee. (the story about the other knee — injured a few months ago — is less interesting than the story of this knee; even doctors yawn and ask if that’s all for now) The camera sustained nothing more than a slight bout of ‘we hit an air-pocket!’ as I descended.
My good deed of missing my meeting just in case a home maintenance project turned into a horror novel wound up with me sporting an ice pack on my knee and acting as the complaint desk for various muscle groups up and down the body. The ribs were annoyed at that twist in the story. The lower back objected to me having followed the clue that the project was wrapping up and needed documenting. The injured knee felt frail and needed hearty applications of the aforementioned tea and sympathy. The other knee whined that life isn’t fair and it wanted a happy ending.
Handy Harry was fine and proceeded to pound nails into the new plank (from the sounds, he and the weighted mallet were working out issues!). The deck looks much better. I, though, was left looking forward to an Epsom salts bath. The cats never showed any interest.
Harry Homeowner’s handiwork
Valerie Bonham 
