If I Had Just Stayed in Bed Today…

I sit here, drinking what’s left of the cooking wine, writing this epistle with a bandaged toe, a bandaged finger and a throbbing chin.

It all started this morning at Sunday breakfast with Mum saying that a woman had approached her yesterday at the library inquiring about the meaning of certain things in dreams. This particular woman had a dream in which she heard a rooster crowing. Her husband happened to have been ill, so she was afraid that this crowing in her dream was a sign of foreboding for her husband and wanted to be prepared if it did indeed mean something bad. Mum said that she would ask my Sister (Sis has dabbled in dream theory for fun in the past), and get back with her. Well, Sister didn’t know what a dream with a crowing rooster in it meant, so she looked it up online. Of course, we all thought that to hear the cock crow thrice was symbolic of a betrayal (let’s thank the Bible for that gem); but to have roosters in your dreams only symbolized goodness (according to the online dream dictionaries that we consulted this morning). We all talked a bit further on the crowing thrice business, but then forgot about it altogether.

Around Noon, I decided to try and nap (I woke up at midnight last night with a stuffy nose and sore throat and had been treating myself all morning with saline nose flushes and saline throat gargles and I was tired, damn it). Forty-five minutes later, when I realized that I just wasn’t going to go to sleep, I decided to get out of bed and conduct my weekly washing of the bed linens. As I was pulling the chair at the end of my bed away so that I could strip the bed, I ran over my foot with the base of the chair. Thinking, “Well, that sure smarts,” I looked down at my right foot, fourth toe, and blood was squeezing out from between the toenail and the flesh to which it was supposed to be attached at an alarmingly slow, yet very determined rate. Upon closer inspection, I noticed that half of my toenail had peeled back. I sort of pushed it back down and limped downstairs to find a bandaide. Nephew was immediately by my side to look at the wound and say very sympathetically, “Auntie has a boo-boo.” Yes, indeedy, I did. I accepted my small dose of kisses from him, so as to feel better, and decided to start prep work on the dinner I was making; it seemed quite safe business to do. Since this was a dry run for Iron Chef Cajun: You and Whose Army 2008, I decided to break out my new knife that Sis had gotten for me over the holidays. It was a beautiful knife, and I needed for it to become an extension of my right hand so that I could wield it in a manner that was befitting a knife of its caliber, especially for the Cajun smack-down against Kansas Slim. As I was working my way through the Holy Trinity of Cajun cooking (I was finished with the onion and celery, so I must have been on the bell peppers at the time), I quite accidentally chopped smack into my finger, through the nail and all. I was stunned. It didn’t hurt (that’s how sharp this knife was-obviously a whole lot sharper than I). No blood until I pushed on the nail to see how deep it went (why do we do things like that?). It went deep enough. My remark to everyone standing within earshot was, “Well, I just cut myself.” More doses of kisses from Nephew so that I would feel better, and back to cutting. I joked out loud that I really should’ve stayed in bed.

The dry-run was going well, despite the bad beginning (sorry Mr. Snicket). The roux had gotten through the various color stages that normal people refer to as peanut, mahogany and deep mahogany (I refer to these stages as, “Wow, it’s changing color…"to "Holy moly, it’s really turning into a cool shade of reddish-brown," to "Crap, I-could-muck-this-up-at-any-moment-if-I-have-to-go-to-the-loo mahogany." I added the vegetables when the roux had reached the perfect shade of mahogany-brown and let them wilt while I washed and dried some dishes. As I was drying my favorite coffee mug (a lovely orange Halloween mug with cavorting jack-o-lanterns and ghoulish holiday greetings), the mug broke away from the handle. I jerked my hand that was still holding the handle back, and caught myself under the chin. It was “Mugs Gone Wild.” With the handle still in my right hand, the mug body crashing to the floor, I was stunned yet again at another sign that I really should have stayed in bed today. I limped into the living room where Mum was playing Lincoln Logs with Nephew, and bleeding from the chin, stammered, “My mug just cut me…” and held up my chin for Mum to see. Nephew came over with his “concerned doctor” countenance stamped upon his face (he’s quite used to this now), and said, “Awwww…are you okaaaayyy?” No, I’m not, thank you for asking though. Two kisses, and call me in the morning...Three bloody injuries, and I’m not leaving this bloody house this evening for fear of more injury.

Franken finger, Franken toe, and Franken chin…all I need are the electrodes under each ear…the finger sucks most of all. I have to wash and dry my hair with both hands, and finger injuries always result in strange hair-grooming complications (like hair-product enhanced inflammation, or strands of hair becoming weirdly embedded in the wound, like a tornado-directed pine needle becoming embedded in a two-by-four). I may have to go unkempt for a while. As the Poet once asked on a summer afternoon, “Have I ever really been kempt?” I suppose that none of us ever were…