Male Pattern Stupidity

That's Adam's phrase, not mine. :)
I was peacefully killing English ivy this afternoon while the lawnmower hummed happily from the orchard, when Adam's voice came bellowing over the grass: "Mary Kathryn! Mary Kathryn!"

I knew he'd either found a pot of gold, or he'd injured himself. He'd injured himself.

"Do you need 9-1-1?" I bellowed back.

"Hmm." He was indecisive.

His ankle was bleeding all over. He'd taken off his sandal. (Yes, he was mowing in sandals.) His sock was soggy. He thought he could maybe walk to the car. I yanked a damp hand towel off the clothesline. He propped his foot on the dash, pressed the towel on his ankle, and we headed to the clinic two minutes away. They wouldn't see him. "He might need an x-ray. We don't have an x-ray machine. You should go to the E.R.," they said.

The hospital is a half hour away. That's when I knew that Male Pattern Stupidity would take up my afternoon.

We'd never heard of the Minor Emergency room. There, they don't have three policemen sitting around guffawing and talking about Donald Trump.

I didn't take a photo of the initial wound because some of you are queasy. Between visits of hospital employees we waited at least 20 minutes. In the end it took over three hours, but that's how it is, yes? He had an x-ray. Nothing was broken. And whatever had spun out of the undercarriage of the lawnmower and sliced into his leg, it wasn't still in his ankle either.

A nice P.A. named Natalie stitched him up. She has twins, and although she's 30 years old, we declared that she didn't look a day over 20. That's how we know we're old: 30 year olds look like they're 20.

Three stitches, that's all. Hardly seems worth going to the E.R., but you can't know until you've been there.
While there, we visited a very ill parishioner in the hospital -- first I visited, then Adam went afterward, limping all the way. When we got home, both of us had only one thought: going straight to the orchard and seeing what in the world had hurt him so badly. Was the mower broken? The force of impact and the amount of pain he'd been in indicated it was something more than a little branch or a pine cone. We mow a lot of branches and pine cones. It didn't take long to find the culprit.

Pardon my wet hand. I'd just done dishes.

Copper wire. Not the first thing you'd expect to find in an orchard, between your grape vines and your apple trees. We used to laugh about our previous owner in Statesville. He was a gardener and the backyard soil was chock full of plastic plant containers and long pieces of metal pipe. We did scratch our heads over him. But Mr. M., the quirky Frenchman who owned this farm before us, I guess he was secretly growing copper in the orchard.

Adam admitted to Julia that if he'd seen that copper wire lying on the ground in front of the mower, he would have mowed right over it. I think most men would have. Nobody wants to turn off the mower, walk around, and pick up every little wire and string on the ground. It's the copper inside that's the killer though. Mr. M. apparently used it to tie up his scuppernong grape vines. He was handy that way, using anything at hand. (sigh!) Adam blames it all on Male Pattern Stupidity, and I suppose in this situation it applies as well to Mr. M. as it does to him.

We're resting on the couch now. The dogs and cat and chickens (and worms and bees, I hope) are all taken care of for the night. See y'all later. I'm pooped.