Looking Up.

When I was a little girl, I remember my childhood home as acres of rolling green and riotous color. My mother’s carefully cultivated rock gardens meandered along gravel paths, an explosion of spring blooms that forever sealed my floral preferences. Lush green blades of grass faded into a dark wood beyond the wooden fence, a fertile ground for my imagination. 

The black-shuttered house looms large in my memory, a castle in the country where hidden rooms and great horned owls and raccoons and Saint Bernards and skunks named Florabelle are the stuff of reality, not fantasy.

And my own black-shuttered house with its Dutch door and picket fence. Where I would watch the red flag on the mailbox to see what treasure the fairies had left behind. A fantastical escape where I would carefully navigate spiders. And ants. And earwigs.

That my father, with the greatest paternal love, told me will crawl into my ears and lay eggs before eating their way through my brain before exiting the other side. Which he proved years later courtesy of Ricardo Montalban’s thespian trek into William Shatner’s stars.

Which is why I don’t lay on the ground. Ever.

But lying here prone on the ground, I have an overwhelming urge to simply close my eyes and forget the world around me.

The world that is Paradise Bakery. In the middle of the lunch hour. Where I am flat on my back, my ears ringing and my tailbone screaming and my peep toes and slim grey dress crawling with tortilla chips and bloody red tomato soup.

“Ma’am, are you okay? You took an awful fall. Do you want us to call the paramedics?”

Staring up at his worried and wizened face, I know that he doesn’t understand that ever since the first time I called the paramedics my life has been in free fall and that this ignominious fall from 3.5-inch grace barely registers. He doesn’t know that today I will put in 12 hours of work, squeeze in two doctor’s appointments, navigate hours of hockey practice with my son, and rush home to spend precious minutes with the daughter who tells me daily she doesn’t have enough time with me. That I am here because I did not have time to make a lunch because I have woken up late every morning for the past two weeks. And the weary, frustrated and lonely me wants nothing more than to unload in a messy tortilla-chips-and-tomato-soup explosion. Ever cautious and burned by more than soup, I push her aside and look up.

“I don’t suppose they’ll be able to rescue my soup?”