Statistics tell us that most accidents happen in the home and usually to me. I keep all the safety shields in place on all farm machinery but I still haven’t given up my habit of walking through the children’s rooms in the dark in my bare feet.
Last week we celebrated Hallowe’en at Grandma’s down on the home farm in Larkspur. We ate a smoked ham, baked beans, Caesar salad and a couple of pieces of coconut pie. Then we stayed up late driving around the neighbours for trick or treat, so we decided to stay overnight at my brother-in-law Buck’s place across the road. After a game of snakes and ladders and a couple more of Grandma’s butter tarts we settled into the chesterfield of his large living room on the main floor some time after midnight.
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One of Grandma’s hand grenades went off in my esophagus at half past two in the morning and I sat up with a sigh, realizing I had left my heartburn prescription pills at home. I decided to slip outside quietly without waking anyone and sit and watch the clouds with Luke, the big collie dog.
Buck is pretty frugal with the hydro and his whole house wouldn’t draw more than three amps in the middle of the night. I felt along the arm of the chesterfield for my glasses and, finding nothing, remembered that there was a table in the middle of the room where I must have left them. So I got down on my hands and knees and set off in the direction of the table.
The darkness was so thick you could cut it and stack it like bales of hay. I crawled along for about a hundred yards and finally bumped against a wall and had to turn around. The journey back to the chesterfield was longer, perhaps a quarter of a mile, but I did finally find the table. It was a big heavy oak thing with sharp corners. Not the sort of table you want to blunder into on all fours in the dark.
I said some words and felt my way up the leg to the tabletop and started patting around for the glasses. Again, I found nothing but my fingers ran up against a pewter candlestick that promptly fell over and hit the table with a crack like a pistol shot. I heard my wife sigh and I carefully set the candlestick upright. It fell over again. My wife groaned. By triangulating from the direction of the groan and the position of the candlestick I made a rough estimate of the location of the door into the kitchen and set off again on all fours.
With the surge of joy that must have filled Columbus when he sighted San Salvador, I finally glimpsed the microwave clock in the distance, my first visual bearing of the evening. I got to my feet and took a step and promptly fell over one of the kitchen chairs. I helped myself up by grabbing hold of the edge of the hot wood stove, leaving some skin there. Then I fell over another chair.
When I got to the microwave I felt my way along the shelf toward the verandah door. The shelf is generally empty, unless of course the pails are there that Abigail uses to hold eggs from the henhouse and slops for the compost heap, but I had forgotten that. I felt both the pails going and I tried to save them but they went over and the contents landed on something soft on the floor below. There was a low growl and a scramble and Luke, who is pretty genial, unless he is dropped on from a height in the dark by a strange man in his underwear, took my feet out from under me once again.
We sat together on the linoleum floor and I scooped as much of the egg and sour cream and dog kibble off him as I could.
Then Luke stood up and shook.
That’s when my wife turned on the kitchen light and found us. She dressed my wounds and found my clothes and set up a stepladder so that we could start picking dog kibble and carrot peels off the ceiling, but this is a job that will not be completed in my lifetime. Abigail has shown herself to be a good, warm-hearted Christian woman because she says she would be happy to have us back sometime.
The author acknowledges the pioneering work done in this field by Mark Twain in his speech to the New York Association for the Blind, “The Sock,” March 1906
