She went to camp to have fun but slipped and fell and maybe broke her foot. Right now she’s got crutches with a cute little grumpy face and puffed up toes. Maybe she should have stayed home. She was safe there.

It happened to me too more than once, like the time mom dropped my brothers and I off at Horse Shoe Lake for the day. Soon we were leaping off a dock.

Kersplash!

I sunk into the ooze beneath that waist deep murky water onto some blunt thing that gashed open the arch of my right foot. It bled dark red rivulets.

This never happened to me at home, which is where I ended up any way, foot injury and all. Maybe I should have just stayed there in the first place and never got hurt.

My brother worked for a farmer and drove the farmers old trucks between the fields. My brother was a thinker. He was pleased to figure things out and made assumptions. There were dirt roads, but he could save some time by driving through a patch of grass that was between them. It would be fun, too. Except that the patch of grass was growing around a deep hole. That’s why it was there. No one ever tried to cut it because the mower would fall in. So the truck tipped down in the hole on it’s nose and he had to find help to get it out. His short cut turned into a wasted day. He probably should have stayed home.

Wait, that story doesn’t belong here. No one got hurt. This is about injuries. So ignore it, except that someone could have gotten hurt.

What if they were sleeping in that grass? What if it was a well or a spring for drinking water? He could have gotten the water dirty then no one could drink it. Or they could drink it but it would taste like a truck.

What if they were guests of the farmer? He’d tell them he has a pure spring water but they will suspect that he trucks his water in because it smells and tastes like truck. They will wonder about their friend the farmer because before that he was an honest guy. But taste does not lie and they think he made up his story about the pure spring water.

Maybe they’d stop trusting that farmer. Or any farmer. They’d switch to junk food because that is made by chemists, not lying farmers.

Twitch Eye bars. Energy sticks. Lily cakes. Enticing names for food that’s all made with chemicals and very tasty once you get used to it. But what would happen if that stuff made them sick? Now who do they trust? Not farmers. Not chemists.

So they take up hunting. They get special clothing and bows and arrows and they go to harvest meat from nature. Except that they like deer to look at, they’re scared of bears, and they really dislike snakes. Plus, they like hamburger patties, but don’t want to take an animal apart to get them, even if they knew how. It’s messy. So they sell all their hunting stuff and go get a hamburger. Then a pizza.

Very good, but it doesn’t solve the original problem that they liked their farmer friend and greatly miss his company. So they go back and see him. He offers them a drink and the water is delicious. They ask what the farmer did differently. Did he switch brands?

He tells them about my brother. They become friends again because now they realize it was all a misunderstanding. He sends them home with fresh broccoli and smiles on their faces. But they can never get back that time so maybe my brother should really have stayed home that day.

Doesn’t matter, he got another job and bought a motorcycle. Easier to pull out of holes and ditches.

One day he got a bad feeling about his job so he stayed home. Between the couch and the refrigerator he stubbed his toe on a chair and started jumping up and down on the other leg with his hurt leg drawn up while he hollered funny sounding things that made no sense. Except that they made perfect sense if you were there. You might yell the same way if it happened to you.

To comfort himself he had ice cream but ate it too fast and got a headache. When that passed he had to go. Then his toilet over flowed on the floor and kept running. Took him an hour to clean it all up. While he did, his puppy jumped onto his easy chair. The cat too. They sat there, the dog with his ears perked up and the cat with kitten-like innocent face listening to my brother complain in another room. Then the dog jumped off and the cat curled up and fell asleep.

My brother was tired and so he rested himself in the chair. All he heard as he descended into the cushion was a muffled squeak toy sound and when he stood up his cat took off like a rocket and knocked over a pole lamp that fell into the TV and caused a lot of sparks and smoke.

He cleaned up the mess and hobbled off to work late. Better late than never. Safer too.

Maybe he should have gone there in the first place.