Falling fifteen feet and landing on a pine board didn’t hurt as badly as I expected.
“Don’t tell dad,” I said groggily pulling myself up off of the ground beneath my two younger siblings whose faces were drawn back with shock and fear.
“How are you not bleeding?” my brother asked me. I shrugged.
“How are you not dead?!” my sister added.
Probably a miracle, I thought, I’m basically invincible. “We need to do this differently,” I told them, brushing off the pieces of bark and dirt and the leaves I’d collected on my descent to the floor of our front yard. I immediately set back to work creating a flying swing from the best heights of our yard.
There was a period in my childhood when we were suicidal maniacs obsessed with ropes and pulleys and the idea of making things out of nature. With expansive imaginations, lots of free time, and very little experience with structure, we spent our afternoons turning our yard into a virtual labyrinth of (dangerous) contraptions.
“I feel like if I came to your house there’d just be kids like, swinging from the ceiling and screaming all over the place,” my dance teacher told me once when I was nine.
Uh, no, we do that OUTSIDE.
We set things on fire. We spent a great deal of time on our roof. We used ropes of every sort to make every kind of sliding system we could think of—anything to get us to fly. People would stop their cars in front of our house, get out, put their hands on their hips and huff to us:
“Does your mother know you’re up there on the roof like that?”
“Yup,” I said. And uh, excuse me, who died and left you in charge of me?
“I’m not leaving until I see you get down,” one woman demanded.
Then you're probably going to be there awhile, I thought.
But by the stringent tone in her voice I knew she meant business. I got off the roof—appalled that a stranger would tell me to do something and expect I would actually obey. Apparently the woman had read “It Takes a Village”.
But of course as soon as she drove off we got back up on the roof again—I mean, we had to attach the rope to the chimney if we were ever going to get enough leverage to make an adequate pulley system, of course.
Before I tied the rope loop up into our enormous elm tree that swayed several feet above the roof and several more feet above the ground, we thought the roof was as high as we could attach a rope. Before the rope loop snapped and I crashed to the ground, we thought the roof was as high as we could fall. And since we’d all taken turns falling off of that roof in one way or another (or jumping off of it onto our trampoline, or sliding off of it into a grove of bushes while tied to a rope) we had very little fear.
There was something comforting about the way shingles smelled after they’d soaked in the sunlight. They’re filled with shards that can give nasty splinters, yes, but the scent of warm pine or oak or whatever they were made of is still so pleasant to me in memory that in my mind, I simply close my eyes and I’m lying face down on the roof, sniffing those shingles again.
“What the hell are you doing?” a neighbor asked me once when I was ten and doing just that—lying face down smelling the shingles on the roof.
What does it look like I’m doing? Duhhh…smelling the roof.
“Checking for termites,” I lied."You never know if they're eating a really big hole in your roof." Everyone needs to check for termites, right?
Granted that’s not everyone’s “happy place”, and neither is it too particularly normal, but the thing is: it’s one of mine. It’s mine and no one can get out of their car and tell me to stop stuffing my face into the roof shingles.
I read a quote by Frederick Buechner last night where he spoke of the importance and significance of “today”. All of our yesterdays lead up to this point and all of our tomorrows extend from it, he says. At that moment I thought, “man, my yesterdays must be BUMMED OUT about where they were pointing to.”
It’s hard to imagine how my yesterdays stacked up to create what my life is now: extremely confusing, a couple tragedies lurking in the corner you can’t really talk about, ridiculously strange, and at times, awfully good and awfully bad and disappointing. At the moment it’s more of the latter.
When I was young I was pretty darn focused on those shingles and ropes and pulleys and surviving our playtimes. It wasn’t very often that I had time to think about loss, or whether I understood it, or the direction and meaning and purpose in my life.
I simply thought of it--those crooked little moments of folly that somehow didn’t land me in the hospital (which is what most of my childhood is made up of)--as a miracle.
I could use some shingles and a little more miracle-thinking these days.
“Don’t tell dad,” I said groggily pulling myself up off of the ground beneath my two younger siblings whose faces were drawn back with shock and fear.
“How are you not bleeding?” my brother asked me. I shrugged.
“How are you not dead?!” my sister added.
Probably a miracle, I thought, I’m basically invincible. “We need to do this differently,” I told them, brushing off the pieces of bark and dirt and the leaves I’d collected on my descent to the floor of our front yard. I immediately set back to work creating a flying swing from the best heights of our yard.
There was a period in my childhood when we were suicidal maniacs obsessed with ropes and pulleys and the idea of making things out of nature. With expansive imaginations, lots of free time, and very little experience with structure, we spent our afternoons turning our yard into a virtual labyrinth of (dangerous) contraptions.
“I feel like if I came to your house there’d just be kids like, swinging from the ceiling and screaming all over the place,” my dance teacher told me once when I was nine.
Uh, no, we do that OUTSIDE.
We set things on fire. We spent a great deal of time on our roof. We used ropes of every sort to make every kind of sliding system we could think of—anything to get us to fly. People would stop their cars in front of our house, get out, put their hands on their hips and huff to us:
“Does your mother know you’re up there on the roof like that?”
“Yup,” I said. And uh, excuse me, who died and left you in charge of me?
“I’m not leaving until I see you get down,” one woman demanded.
Then you're probably going to be there awhile, I thought.
But by the stringent tone in her voice I knew she meant business. I got off the roof—appalled that a stranger would tell me to do something and expect I would actually obey. Apparently the woman had read “It Takes a Village”.
But of course as soon as she drove off we got back up on the roof again—I mean, we had to attach the rope to the chimney if we were ever going to get enough leverage to make an adequate pulley system, of course.
Before I tied the rope loop up into our enormous elm tree that swayed several feet above the roof and several more feet above the ground, we thought the roof was as high as we could attach a rope. Before the rope loop snapped and I crashed to the ground, we thought the roof was as high as we could fall. And since we’d all taken turns falling off of that roof in one way or another (or jumping off of it onto our trampoline, or sliding off of it into a grove of bushes while tied to a rope) we had very little fear.
There was something comforting about the way shingles smelled after they’d soaked in the sunlight. They’re filled with shards that can give nasty splinters, yes, but the scent of warm pine or oak or whatever they were made of is still so pleasant to me in memory that in my mind, I simply close my eyes and I’m lying face down on the roof, sniffing those shingles again.
“What the hell are you doing?” a neighbor asked me once when I was ten and doing just that—lying face down smelling the shingles on the roof.
What does it look like I’m doing? Duhhh…smelling the roof.
“Checking for termites,” I lied."You never know if they're eating a really big hole in your roof." Everyone needs to check for termites, right?
Granted that’s not everyone’s “happy place”, and neither is it too particularly normal, but the thing is: it’s one of mine. It’s mine and no one can get out of their car and tell me to stop stuffing my face into the roof shingles.
I read a quote by Frederick Buechner last night where he spoke of the importance and significance of “today”. All of our yesterdays lead up to this point and all of our tomorrows extend from it, he says. At that moment I thought, “man, my yesterdays must be BUMMED OUT about where they were pointing to.”
It’s hard to imagine how my yesterdays stacked up to create what my life is now: extremely confusing, a couple tragedies lurking in the corner you can’t really talk about, ridiculously strange, and at times, awfully good and awfully bad and disappointing. At the moment it’s more of the latter.
When I was young I was pretty darn focused on those shingles and ropes and pulleys and surviving our playtimes. It wasn’t very often that I had time to think about loss, or whether I understood it, or the direction and meaning and purpose in my life.
I simply thought of it--those crooked little moments of folly that somehow didn’t land me in the hospital (which is what most of my childhood is made up of)--as a miracle.
I could use some shingles and a little more miracle-thinking these days.
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