Accident

It's been hard to write today. This morning it's a move your hand for 20 minutes across the page and don't look back kind of start. That's the trick to jumpstart writing. No, I'm not really going to write anything. I'm just going to sit here and doodle in sentences. Then it comes out.

When a big emotion sits in my throat, it's sometimes hard to write. At which angle do I start? What bit do I want to describe? Was it the man from the AAA with his long curly blond ponytail and his lined face, driving us almost into (yet another) ditch as he scrabbled around with the paperwork after he recovered my broken car? Or the baby racoon on the road, newly squashed? As I sat on the roadside waiting for a breakdown truck, I kept hearing this obscene pop as people drove over the small body, until they'd worn a groove through its guts. I wished for a shovel and gloves, to give him a little burial in the woods, or at least scrape him off the road into a plastic bag. I know people who carry shovels and bags for that reason. So far, I haven't been one of them.

We very nearly ended up in hospital on Sunday carting a load of tiles home on our trailer. We had a blow-out which caused the trailer to jacknife several times across lanes of traffic, missing - like dodgeball or jumprope - an oncoming black jeep, then missing a telephone pole and finally into a ditch with a gentle slope and two piles of gravel at the bottom. We coasted to a stop so slight it didn't even engage the seatbelts.

I kept silent as Paolo negotiated the crisis, but remember thinking: "I have to stay alive for my kids. They need me." When we got out of the car we discovered one rear tires off its mud-caked rim, the other too compromised to move, and the left wheel of the trailer had blown. Incredibly (upon incredibly) we lost only one box of tile.

Paolo didn't touch the brake or accelerator and steered in the opposite direction each time. Little did he know he hadn't the use of either back tire. He practices in the snow in the back field with the Ford to improve his driving skills, and that experience kept us from flipping. But the oncoming traffic, the telephone poles - that was sheer serendipity.

Afterwards I watched them cart away my Explorer with it's bumpersticker: "Angels, don't leave home without them," with its corny graphics showing flying angels with lunchboxes.

You do the math.