The Oldest Scar

I was looking at my leg the other day and I saw a scar on the outside of my left knee.   It’s been there for a long time.  It’s possibly the oldest scar I have.   It’s about one inch long.   I have a lot of little scars and marks on my body at this age, indicating maybe a life of hazard or perhaps a life well lived, I don’t know.  

This particular scar I remember exactly how I got when I was young.   I don’t know how old I was but I was old enough to take out the trash.   Back then our trash can was a round, metal bin that sat in the far back of our yard.   On trash or was it garbage days, back then they were separate I think, we’d have a man step off the garbage truck and walk through our yard as well as the close neighbor’s yards and collect the trash.

He would walk past the hammock I spent untold hours swinging in in the years to come, open up our metal bin and take out any bags of garbage inside.  He would put them into the larger, plastic bin on he propped up on his back and then head to the next house.   The garbage truck would pick him up at the end of the street around the corner.

On this particular day my mother asked me if I would take out the full garbage bag and put it into the metal bin.   And also, could I make sure the lid was on tightly because there had been a raccoon problem and the lid tightly on would keep out any interlopers.

I wanted to be sure to do a good job.   My father had securely fixed the trash can by adding wooden stakes around its perimeter.   With this knowledge in hand I put the bag of garbage in, put the lid on, climbed on top and then jumped up and down on the lid to make sure there was no chance it would be pried off.   I wasn’t expecting the lid to slip.   And I wasn’t expecting to fall.

I fell off and on the way down got a deep scrape in my left leg on a the sharp corner of one of the stakes.   I remember looking at my leg and seeing no blood, only the white, fatty tissue underneath—initially.   And then it started to bleed.   A lot.

I ran in and at that point my memory has faded, but what remains today is the scar line from that day that I made sure no raccoon could possibly tear into our trash.  

The Big Boy Update:  I had a board meeting tonight.   When I returned home the children were in bed but my husband said my son had left me something on my nightstand.   My son hasn’t been that interested in writing, it being mostly a chore to him—unlike math, which he finds enjoyable.   He had written a full page about when he was born and who his family members were.   I’m looking forward to telling him how much I enjoyed reading it when I see him in the morning.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter has been using my husband’s Virtual Reality Oculus Rift glasses a lot lately.   They turn things three dimensional, but they do so at a fixed focal length—possibly a focal length she can see well in.   She can spend hours working on Minecraft with the glasses on.