Bent out of Shape
I ran down the beige-carpeted hall of my childhood home wearing child-sized pink plastic high heels. It was the day after Christmas, and I was high on sugar and the scent of Barbie rubber and wrapping paper.
“I’m a model,” I screamed at my sisters before feeling a slight twist as my left ankle crumbled below me.
My parents rushed from separate rooms of the house as I sobbed over the glittery rubber shoes, then propped me up in front of the tv with ice and pillows while my sisters claimed innocence. My older sister poured me a glass of grape juice and I bemoaned my sore leg while we watched Wheel of Fortune. The heels disappeared, but my ankle is forever weak, even 30 years later. Stupid ankle.
It was sometime in February or March of 2019, in an RV park thirty minutes outside Dallas Texas. Jeremiah’s health insurance had mandated six weeks of physical therapy after we’d heard a disc in his back crunch. While we didn’t know it then, it would be a little less than a year later that he would become part titanium Terminator with bolts and screws in his back.
Three months into our journey, and it had been put on hold, demanding that we do exactly what we didn’t want to do: stay in place. Drizzly cold rain had been incessant so instead of my typical hikes or walks, I’d been pacing back and forth inside, waiting for better weather. One afternoon, the rain stopped. Instead of endless tapping on our fiberglass roof, we could hear the nearby freeway and the angry geese announcing their territory as they plopped their fattened bodies into the pond facing our motorhome.
I looked eagerly at Jeremiah, and with a few words he popped three ibuprofen for his back pain and we laced up our perpetually soggy hiking boots, leashed up the dog, and stepped out onto the soupy gravel. The sun danced on the pond where the geese bickered between one another, and we slipped between tens of other RVs. Our dog danced a little between us, darting out ten feet before looking over her shoulder to us.
It was late afternoon, and we were grateful the rain had ceased shortly before the sun set. Past the RV park, we waded through long grass, the mud below it suctioning our boots with every step. We made our way to the top of a knoll to watch traffic along the freeway as commuters navigated the four-lane road. It was cold, but the low-hanging sun was a reprieve as it glittered on wet blades of long grass.
We turned back a little happier than a few minutes earlier. The sun had dipped lower, shooting pinks and purples into the sky. I looked up, and my left foot landed in a muddy gopher hole. My bodyweight shoved itself awkwardly down, twisting my ankle.
“Jeremiah,” I croaked out before starting to cry, and the dog scurried away, thinking that I was in a play stance.
Jeremiah kneeled beside me, “let me help,” he said.
I knew though that he couldn’t help without putting himself at risk. The mile walk was all he could manage before his legs would no longer support him from the pain his back radiated. I couldn’t accept his help. In that three-second moment of falling and grabbing my ankle, I felt terribly angry.
Angry at Jeremiah’s health insurance for not offering an MRI for six more weeks.
Angry that we were stuck in rainy Texas.
Angry that I twisted my ankle and was now covered in mud.
A minute passed — or perhaps it was only thirty seconds — before I pulled myself upright and limped beside Jeremiah, lying that I had only cried from fear, not pain. We protect the ones we care about when we can.
It would only be a few weeks before I had mostly forgotten the incident. Pain is funny that way. Some of the anger had passed; some was residual for months.
But I had forgotten the pain until last week when I trotted up the hill that leads to my garden. Dead branches were draped over my arms. The soft centers of the branches and sticks were rotting, making good homes for termites: ideal for garden compost. In my jeans pocket an assortment of seeds waited: parsnips, purple and yellow carrots, lettuce-leaf basil, Chinese chives. My chin was held high over the branches in my arms as I shuffled over our gravel driveway when my boot-covered foot slipped into a muddy hole. Down I went, no more gracefully than when I was eight in our carpeted hall. I was surrounded by tiny soft pieces of lichen and rotted wood, the branches squished to tiny twigs and sawdust.
“Ouch,” I said aloud to nobody, then, “just don’t look at it.”
And I didn’t.
Instead, I got up, checked out the sticks, and told myself I would pick them up later. I limped to my garden, leaned over my raised beds, and reached for the seeds in my pocket. Every evening for the last week, I’ve iced my stupid ankle. Sometimes Jeremiah gets the ice pack for me, but I grab my own grape juice.
The only thing I’m angry about now is that I don’t have those high-heeled glitter heels.
