REALITY?: Trapped!

A picture would’ve been better, but I was too embarrassed to holler for help and a camera. I got hung up in the grapes this morning.   

You know how even though you’re afraid of heights you find yourself on the top rung of the ladder because you are so focused on what you’re painting that you reach up and up with the brush, another board, another couple inches, and unwittingly your feet adjust for your short arms and take another step without telling you?  Then you look down and freeze.  I’ve done that.  Twice.  Once Jim saved me and once Andy the neighbor as he mowed by and realized I hadn’t moved at all in ten minutes.

Anyhow, that’s what happened this morning.  One final picking, just cause they’re there and will be wasted and I can make one more batch of jelly since if I get a full time job outside the house I won’t have time to do these nature-woman things anymore.  One luscious purple cluster led to another and another until I found myself rather deep into a tangle of brush and raspberry vines wrapped around my ankles with their teeny little needle thorns gripping in.  Something had my hair locked in its grasp from one direction then another.  Left sleeve caught up by a branch and bracelets on the right hooked around a bunch of grape leaves and got worse with trying to pull free. I felt so dopey I could cry.

No one around to see me in my silly misery, no one to help.  Damned if I’d let myself be found someday come spring, a skeleton held fast among the twigs and branches in the field. Clutching the precious treasure to my chest delicately so as not to squash them all against my shirt, I struggled, pulled, moved backward, raspberries tearing at my legs, my hair pulled out by stubborn trees, shirt untorn but marked by scars, and stumbled free.  Picked up my bag of booty and happily went home.

And you’re the only ones who know it and I can’t hear you laugh.