Being one week mentally late in preparing for the busiest season of my work, I’m planning ahead now and have assured myself that the frameshop is well supplied with Band-Aids. Normally by Christmas Day I am wearing three to four of them on my fingers and hands from glass and paper cuts—mainly to keep blood off the pieces as I frantically continue working. But there have also been some more serious injuries: dropping ten feet down from the loft and landing flat on my back on the concrete floor; pulling out a twenty-inch shard of glass embedded an inch into the skin above my pubic bone; and the worst, holding together a gash on my leg that required a dozen stitches because a tiny 8 x 10 piece of glass ever so slightly tilted as I stepped on an edge and cut slowly to the bone. Luckily, a customer was there with me that time and was able to run into the house and get some towels to stanch the bleeding as I hopped to the phone and called my husband who miraculously showed up within 10 minutes when he worked 20 minutes away. A regular customer of mine, an artist and good friend by now, has given me florists’tape; something they use in their business to wrap on their fingers and I now use to protect my own to some degree from the repeated wrapping of the wire hangers. Prior to this, I’ve spent Christmas with holes in my thumbs as well.
So this in truth is what drives me to write. It’s a bit less hazardous to one’s physical self, albeit most likely not to one’s mental state.
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology