The Spring Cleaning Part
Last week we decided to do a proper spring cleaning on the first floor of our house. It’s almost all wood flooring, the outliers being the powder room and the laundry room that have tile floors.
As you can imagine cleaning and waxing all the wood floors means moving furniture, rugs, plants, lamps, decorative items from one room to another; then moving them back from whence they came.
Please note that we’re not obsessive about doing all the spring cleaning in one day, like we were when we were younger and working and being social butterflies who had places to go, people to meet.
No, now we go with the flow and take our time.
Over a few days.
The Tumble Part
Well, we’d done the floors in all the rooms except the living room. And I suppose I was feeling a little cocky about how efficiently we’d moved furniture and such around the first floor, like pros.
But pride goeth before the fall, people. [No pun intended but it is one.]
So as we were carrying the rolled up 8′ x 10′ heavy wool rug + pad back into the living room preparing to place it just so, I lost my balance on the slick clean waxed floor and dramatically, albeit slowly, fell down, KERPLUNK.
At this point, if’n we were a younger married couple, my true love would have rushed to my side making sure I was uninjured.
However as a much older married couple my true love knows I’m clumsy as all get out, so he just looked at me in a heap on the floor and said: “it’s just a few more steps to get the rug into place, you gonna help?”
Thus prompted by his *concern* I stood up, doublechecking the knee on which I’d fallen to see if it still worked. And it did. As did my toes that had gotten twisted around and smashed when I sat unceremoniously on them.
No harm, no foul.
The Discussion Part
Now the foregoing isn’t meant to be a motherly warning against wearing only socks on your feet when you move heavy items around on wood floors, which I think we can agree might not have been, in retrospect, a good idea.
Instead think of this tale as the precursor to the conversation that followed in which we discussed what I could/should/might say to our primary care physician when I go for my annual physical checkup wherein she’ll ask: have you fallen in the last year?
The answer to this question is, of course, dependent upon how you choose to define “fall.” To wit:
Is a fall any incident wherein you find yourself unintentionally down on the floor/ground despite the unusualness of the situation? Such as what happened to me while helping with the rug, something that might be classified as a minor mishap, merely a slip.
OR
Is a fall specifically when you lose your balance unexpectedly whilst doing something normal like walking around your house, your neighborhood, a store, a park, wherever? Such as tripping over something, or having a stroke-like moment, resulting in a serious keeling over out of nowhere.
I await your insightful comments, my little moonbeams of good health. Trust me when I say this has been an ongoing, unresolved, conversation here at Chez Bean.
What say ye?
THE SPECTACLED BEAN 