There is a goose egg coming out of my knee cap. Never before have I experienced any sort of protrusions from my knee. It reminds me a bit of a Barbie leg that has been chewed by a dog so that certain chunks of plastic end up in places they aren’t supposed to be. The color, I must say, is very attractive. Something like an azure blue. It’s an elegant, classy sort of bruise. How I managed to acquire it was, maybe, less than elegant and classy.
This morning I jerked awake, sitting upright in bed like I had just emerged from deep waters with my lungs having reached the end of their capacity. I stared wide-eyed at my husband, who was standing in front of the bed with a panicked look on his face.
We mothers have freakish tendencies. There is this miraculous instinct that allows us to stay in a constant state of semi-alertness, but only to the concerns of the children. If a child grumbles in the night across the house, I will wake. If my husband stands before me looking panic stricken in the wee hours of the morning, I will instantaneously leap from a sleep state to hyper alertness with fear over the children.
“The children are fine,” he panted, reading my face. “There’s a leak—in the bathroom—water is everywhere! I’m going to shut off the water main!” And he streaked out of the dark room like a ghostly sort of shadow, with the sound of the garage door following.
I hopped out of bed, passing the bright red electric lights on the stove that read 5:45. Pre-dawn, but not by much. The house was dark, but there was no mistaking the location of the drama. I just needed to follow the sound of the waterfall, or go upstream, fighting the current through the hallway, toward the watershed of a bathroom.
A small, harmless looking pipe from behind the toilet was blasting water in a furious way outward. It was the sort of thing you really didn’t see coming. Like when you see a toddler in the grocery store looking all sweet, and then its mother declines to allow it a cookie, and suddenly the demons come out.
So I’m being a little dramatic, the water level was only reaching my toenails. Still, water at toenail depth does not belong in my hallway. Its steady charge forward toward the living room like it was on some sort of great conquest was not exactly a calming thing to see. I eyed the grandfather clock, realizing it would soon be dipping its toes into water for the first time. I spun around in the puddles like a frog, uncertain how to attempt that extreme a level of damage control. The mop.
Ha, the mop. Mops are for small puddles. I threw the mop aside, like I was littering at the pond. I snagged a big towel and started sopping it up, then wringing it into the mop bucket. Meanwhile, my husband was scampering around the edge of the property next to the street, in his underwear, trying to unearth the water main that was semi-buried underneath at least a year’s worth of leaves. Folks were leaving on their early commutes and getting a bit of a show to go with that cup of coffee they were sipping.
Back inside, the waterfall noise suddenly stopped. I cast a suspicious look from side to side at the suddenly eerie silence, followed by the drip, drip, drip of misplaced water. My husband returned, walking slowly now, weary to examine the creek that had formed in our hallway.
“I was going after a roach,” he said.
For you northerners that don’t know, the palmetto bug is an ugly and sizable beast that is a frequent companion to us Floridians. They, along with their friends the wolf spiders, enjoy waiting for you to let the dogs out at midnight, or maybe you forgot something in your car, so that you open the castle gates after dark. They charge inward, those little barbarians, and they scurry for cover. They aren’t as nasty as those little roaches that infest your home. Rather, they like to try their luck as your roommate, until sometime around dawn when an early waking husband spots it on the bathroom floor.
“I was trying to kill the roach and I bumped the pipe. It burst open. That’s what we get for 24 year old plastic,” he said. “I didn’t get the little bastard either. He must have thought the flood that followed was part of the attack. He was swimming around in the puddle trying to escape.”
I nodded sympathetically, continuing my water sopping. “Thank god we have ceramic tile. This will dry soon enough,” I said, standing. I walked across the room on the shiny sheen of my ceramic tile, which is of course also highly slippery, but I was too absorbed to pay that any mind. That is until the ceramic tile paid me mind. Bam.
My knee really is the hero of this story, because it broke my fall like the greatest of knights in shining armor. In honor of this act of bravery, it earned this truly beautiful goose egg. Purple heart, blue bruise—same concept.
In a while we managed to get the worst of it done, and I went back to bed after dawn. A few hours later I awoke and there stood my husband, looking proud.
“I fixed the pipe,” he said nonchalantly, but then that look of pride filled his face. “And I got the cockroach!”
