WHOOPS!

There are some friends and family members who claim that I am accident-prone. I have two explanations for this.

First, some adverse events are due to bad luck. For example, my two sisters and I were standing side-by-side on my dad’s farm. All the buildings and equipment had long-since disintegrated, and the weeds were up to our knees. Suddenly, without any of us moving a muscle, a piece of strap iron sproinged up out of the grass and sliced my calf. It did not touch my sisters. I was selected for this honor by the universe. It was not an accident.

Second––and this is my primary assertion––people who move around more, who do more things, will have more encounters in life; they’ll have more good experiences and more disasters. Someone who stays home and sits in a recliner is not likely to fall victim to that invisible, incredibly slippery algae that grows on concrete surfaces. She would not have had the opportunity to step back onto such algae-covered concrete and rip 30 feet down into  Lake Michigan in downtown Chicago right before a family wedding.

And I don’t think it’s much different when it happens at the Coralville Reservoir; same algae, same result, except I sat down hard in the water on a really sharp fossil.

I moved out to the country for a reason: adventure! I climb trees, I jump fences, I exhume cows. It's no surprise that things will happen. The accident in our front yard falls squarely in that category: if I weren’t an active person. . . . . . .

It was freezing cold, the snow was a foot deep, and the wind was blowing birds by the window in a direction they were not facing. Poor little fellows. There was no way I was going to leave those feeders empty.

I put on all of my winter clothing and dragged a 5-gallon bucket of bird feed to the feeding center. I could hardly find the bird feeders, because driving snow was pelting my eyeballs. I squeezed them shut leaving just a tiny peephole.

The  biggest feeder is filled by folding its entire roof back. Very easy design. I’d be done in no time. Already frozen, I decided to put all seeds in that feeder and run for the house. I lifted the huge bucket way over my head and opened my eyes just long enough to aim.

At that moment, a gust of wind hit me from behind, my feet left the icy ground and became airborne, and I landed on my back.

That was not the accident; that was just an incident. The accident part came next.

The 5-gallon bucket tipped over and emptied itself all over me. More like into me. Both ears were packed with birdseed. There were seeds under my eyelids. Some of it would have to be flossed out-if I lived through the choking; my mouth was also full. While none of those results were fun, they were nothing compared to having bird food up both nostrils clear to my sinuses.

I sneezed out mustard seeds, I hocked up millet, I picked niger seeds from my tear ducts. The other 4-gallons of seed went down inside the front of my shirt.

Someone who never goes out in inclement weather to feed the birds would not have such an accident. And they would not have birds either.

Just remember, it's not the number of accidents that counts. It’s the ratio of accidents to adventures that counts!