Memoir Monday - Madmother: Stuntwoman Extraordinaire!

Aww, crap. Did it again. Forgot about memoir Monday until it appeared in my Tuesday blog feed! Ah well, on with the tale for Travis's little thing (his words, not mine. I would never call his thing little. I have no idea about the size of his thing, it is beyond the scope of my personal experiences...).

This is going to be a quickie. Kids, school, work, yadda yadda...

I am an exceptionally talented woman (well, you all knew that), but I bet you didn't know of my stunt spectacular side? Only those very close to me know this one. The tragedy is it would have won Funniest Home Videos hands down except we didn't film it. Well, I guess we didn't know the show was going to be on.

Scene: Beautiful late summer day. Balmy, light breeze, sun is starting to dip in the west. Birds are singing, crickets chirping, Madmother manically mowing large lawn (we have nearly three acres so mowing is a little bit of a time consuming chore). The monster I ride is a 42" Cox similar to this one, but bigger. Vroom, vroom.

Yes, I will admit to being a bit of a rev-head speed demon - hey, I am a busy woman with lots to do. Well, that is my excuse andI'm sticking to it. Not mentioning the thrill of 15hp throbbing between the legs, quickly changing thrust, manoeuvring through the bushy brush, no sirree, none of those innuendoes here.

On this particular day I am hurrying around, swiftly turning, forward, reverse, cut, cut, cut.

Big Boy is wandering around cleaning up the garden. He walks around to the front of our house, out of the line of vision as I quickly dart under and through the swing set area. Now, we do not have one of those piddly little cheap metal and plastic play sets, no siree. Ours is a solid steel construction with heavy metal chains and huge rubber swingseats. In fact, one was a full, heavy circular tyre.

Big boy claims I was doing around the twenty kilometre mark. Mind you, this incident left him stunned, worried, quickly hurrying to check... I'll come back to this.

SO. I was flying through the middle of the swings, which by the way, were not yet concreted in. Holes dug, legs in said holes, but no cement. Have you clever bunnies worked it out yet? You seem to always be one step ahead of me, so have you?

Back to tales of a stuntmother. I'm flying through the gap between the two swings. The rubber swing seat (not the tyre, but the flatter one) wraps around the hand brake lever. I am oblivious at this point.

Well, what are the theories. Do I flip the tractor? Do I come to a grinding halt? Do I fly off the mowing beast into the air?

I look up as the mower slows. Flying like a catapault over my head is the whole swing set! Luckily the chain length is around 2 metres, as it tautly flies past the tyre clips my left arm feeling somewhat like a sledgehammer blow. Now how do I paint this picture clearly. Me, sitting on mower now halted. Chain of swing taut, straight, stretched to the limit of its capacity. Full solid steel swing set top bar flying perfectly parallel two metres above the mower. And me. It lands, completely straight onto top metal beam. The impact is loud, as is my scream.

Big Boy comes running from front of home. Worried, quickly hurrying to check...

if the bloody swing set is damaged!

Yeah, you read it right. Forget the wife, worry about the expensive swing set. Wife decapitated, no worries. Swing scratched, oh my, what shall we do?

But. You must admit it. It looked absolutely FANfuckingTASMAGORIC! It was a spectacular spectacle. Unfortunately witnessed by no others. I wore the purple/yellow/black bruised band of honour on my arm proudly.

But hell, my heart was pounding for the rest of the day. As my friends say when hearing of my adventure:

"Only YOU!"