When I was young my grandma lived in an old house with a couple of stories and the original hard wood flooring on the stairs. If you ran too quickly down the stairs in stocking feet, to answer the phone or get a fresh piece of grandma’s kougan, you invariably lost your footing, landed on the wood with your tailbone, and bump-bump-bumped on your butt down the remaining stairs. Everyone in the family had done it, and most of my friends had done it too. It’s just what happened at her house.
Grandma’s House
When I renovated my trailer, the first to go was the horrible flooring – ancient linoleum and well-used beige carpet. I replaced it all with laminate beech wide-plank flooring, and I love it. Clean, easy, bright. Perfect.
My father refers to me as having “the worst balance in the world.” I can (and have) fall over just standing there. I fell over in my desk twice in elementary school. I once fell onto a snowboard racecourse while standing at the starting line. I got stitches in my hand from falling in the woods. The wind blew me over twice in Iceland. I was on crutches several times as a kid. In Athens I couldn’t walk a block without wiping out on the marble sidewalks. I have entered Safeway airborne, because of tripping on the door frame. I’ve fallen down several flights of stairs, tripped up even more flights of stairs, and because of that, had recurring nightmares in high school about tumbling down those stairs, usually while naked ( 
).
That’s me strolling around Athens, likely immediately prior to or preceding a nice fall.
So this last weekend, it should have come as no surprise when I found myself upside down in a corner of my trailer. Here’s how it happened…. I was wearing my pajamas and fuzzy socks, and making breakfast. Actually I was burning breakfast, and lunged to remove the pan from the heat, and in doing so flung my egg flipper thingy behind my infrared heater. This heater is a large rolling wooden box; and as I leaned sideways over the box to retrieve my egg flipper it rolled, my feet slipped out from under me (you know, slippery floors and fuzzy socks, just like at grandma’s), and I teeter-tottered over the heater and onto my head. I had wedged myself into the corner and bruised up my thigh, but all I could do was lay there laughing.
Ahhhhhh, if only someone else had been there to see it…. It would have been worth the humiliation. It was pretty funny! Funny enough to share. I’m sure of it!
Rebecca Knabe
