Tumbling Down

One of my greatest talents is climbing up things and falling off them.  I know, everyone gets jealous, but I assure you, through these anecdotes you will learn how to gracefully clamber up anything only to awkwardly tumble off at a later time.  If you practice enough, you could develop this into a charming personality trait that will find you friends, acquaintances, significants, even youtube fame.  (I'm still working on the last one, but, like all truly great endeavors, its a constant work in progress)

One of my favorite pastimes, as a child and even now, was climbing up tall things.  I was the first one to defy gravity of my sisters.  Unfortunately, I didn’t really plan out my strategy as well as I could have, and I ended up trapped in a 4 foot tall apple tree, hanging by one stuck leg, sobbing, while Twin ran and got my mother.  To be fair, four feet is pretty high when you are only like 2 feet tall, and I was wearing a dress so climbing down was really hard. 

Thankfully, I did all of my early climbing in dresses, because I refused to pants until this kid in kindergarten (A ginger named Alex) made fun of me and I didn’t wear a dress again until I was 16.  I feel this made me much more confident in my skills, while actually making me less adept at climbing.

Regrettably, no amount of dress climbing could prepare me for a lesson I learned several years later.  I’m sure many of you have learned this lesson the hard way as well.  It is the dead branch lesson.  If you want your fall through time and space to make a truly magnificent impression, the dead branch fall is the way to go.  I was perhaps eight at the time, and climbing a tree that stuck out from a hillside.  I was a bold and daring adventurer.  I was discovering a new world as my sisters and father cavorted below.  I scoffed at them and their earth-bound natures. 

I scoffed my way right onto a dead branch that snapped and sent me plummeting 16 feet to the ground.  This was a fall so epic that my mother, in our apartment three floors up and 30 yards away, heard the crash and looked out to see her cherished oldest daughter sprawled out on the earth like a starfish.  Thankfully, by the time she made it down the stairs I had stopped gasping for air and was reasonably sure I would not suffocate on the choking lumps of hindsight that were clogging my lungs and whispering 'I told you so'.

You would think, after my epic failure to defeat the laws of gravity as an 8 year old, I would become somewhat more circumspect in my adventures.  You would be wrong.  Over the following years I have fallen face first, fallen of cliffs, tripped over string and fallen into holes in the ground, fallen of roofs, fallen of fences, fallen out of at least 30 more trees, and fallen out of my van.  I have perfected my art.

I did not know it at the time, but there was a reason for all this falling.  You see, once again I was frolicking carelessly about, this time in a snowball fight at college.  And, let me just tell you, all those years of war games with other military children paid off because I was winning.  I was Alexander the Great, if he was conquering an icy driveway in boots and a sweater dress.  And, like all tyrants, I fell.  I didn’t just fall, I bit it.  It was a cartoon character tumble, a feet-going-up-over-my-head epic spill.  And that was when boyfriend noticed how stupendous I was. 


Got out, little birds, and fall epically.  It's how you make friends.