Felled By A
Blackberry Bramble
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I certainly never expected to spend
an afternoon in the emergency room of the local hospital on my holiday with my
son and granddaughter. Just an innocent scratch, I tried to tell myself.
Lexi and I, along with Deckard the
Dog, had walked the newly-hacked trail to the “Fort” in the woods, constructed
by Lexi’s grandpa and father. If you’ve never been around wild blackberries,
you need to know, the vines are indestructible.
Left to grow uninhibited, blackberry
brambles will eventually push out the holly, salal, ferns and all other woods
growth. Wild vines can and do take down entire buildings, including abandoned
barns and houses. I’ve seen it.
When I first moved to Washington
back in the early ‘80s, I didn’t understand this phenomenon. I was appalled
when I saw my neighbor out hacking away blackberry bushes at the edge of his
yard. Coming from Montana, where chokecherries, a poor excuse for fruit,
requiring extreme measures to harvest and use, are revered, I learned any fruit
is sacred and blackberries are rare treasures.
The following year, and every year
thereafter, in the spring and again, in the fall, after I had picked all the
plump juicy berries I wanted for pies and jellies, machete in hand, I hacked
the vines into pseudo submission. Blackberries always win.
So even though Ben had cleared the
path through the woods to the Fort, errant vines lurked. As I followed, Lexi ran
ahead along the uneven ground, with Deckard tugging on his rope in my left hand
and my cane for balance in my right hand. An errant blackberry vine whipped out
and sliced through the back of my calf.
My leg was bloody but I was on a
mission so paid no attention. Lexi gave me the grand treehouse tour, we poked
around the base of the tree a while, then returned home. After I cleaned my
messy leg, I considered I might need stitches but could probably get by without
them. What’s one more scar? I smeared Bag Balm, my go-to cure-all, on my leg
and promptly ignored what was obviously not a mortal wound.
Three days later, while having
coffee with Kathy Currie and Cass Quinn, friends from my theatre days, Kathy
noticed my cut leg with an expression of horror. Remember, this thing is on the
back of my calf, not terribly painful, out of sight, out of mind. I twisted
around to look. Ewww. My leg sported a nasty purple gash, discolored an inch
around the edges of the actual cut.
My son Ben, who’d worked several
years in nursing homes when younger, cleaned the cut, disinfected a needle and
broke through the crust, expressed the discharge, and smeared on an antibiotic
cream, hoping for the best. By this time my leg looked as though it were being
eaten from the inside out.
On the second day of home treatment,
Ben and I looked at my leg, looked at each other, and without another word,
climbed into the car and took my infected leg to the Emergency Room at Harrison
Hospital. I’m terrified of infections with good reason. I have a prosthetic
knee on one leg and prosthetic hip on the other.
That’s why I’m taking a horse-pill antibiotic,
my mouth tastes like metal, food turns my stomach and I must rise up in the
middle of the night to swallow another pill, rigidly adhering to the doctor’s
precise instructions.
The good news is the pills work.
Yes, I should have gone in for stitches. I’ll add one more scar to my growing
collection.
Now, please understand I’ll probably
not act on impulse. I’ve never been one to consider tattoos. I can admire good
tattoo work on you but have never been tempted to deliberately jab needles into
my own skin. However, my legs are criss-crossed with scars.
Recently I’ve thought about creating a “roadmap” tattoo,
utilizing my natural “lay of the land”, complete with scars, dips and doodles.
Towns along the “route”. Mountains and valleys. Perhaps add a lake here and a
railroad track there. I could create
an entire mythical country from my natural scars of life lived.
Sondra
Ashton
HDN: Looking
out my back door
August 17,
2017
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