WINGING IT

Two stories I promised I'd share.

(This first came up when, talking to freudiancascade, I idly mentioned that my thumb hurt the same way it had the time I jumped out a window. "You did WHAT?" was her very valid response. Because I'm really not the type to go climbing through windows willy-nilly.)

When I was in my early teens, my family owned a tiny tiny cabin on a lakeshore not far from the city. The whole place was rickety and falling apart; the furnace wouldn't always work when we came out in the winter, and the deck needed replacing, and everything could have used a fresh coat of paint. But it was cozy in the winter and a shelter in the summer when we'd spend most of the time outside instead.

I shared a bedroom with both sisters that was barely large enough for the two bunk beds. One summer day, my sister Kez realized that the screen on the window was loose. It was only the two of us in the room at the time, as Mom and the youngest sister were in the kitchen on the other side of the little cabin. So Kez and I fiddled with the screen and discovered that we could remove it entirely.

It wasn't long before our discussion turned to the possibility of using the window as a method of leaving the house. Neither of us were very serious, and we knew it wouldn't work as a secret door because it would be too high from the outside to get back in.

Now, I'm not an adventurous type in the least. Yet I was suddenly overcome by the desire to leap out the window. It was something people did in books all the time, and it felt like the sort of experience everyone should have at some point in their life. And so, next thing I knew, I'd propped up a stool beneath the window and climbed up on the ledge. Then I jumped.

It was a little bit further to the ground than I expected. I fell to my knees and caught myself with my hand and paused for an instant before scrambling back to my feet. My sister was peering through the window and we grinned triumphantly at each other. My hand was stinging somewhat, and I brushed the dirt from my palm absently while telling Kez that it probably wouldn't be the best idea for the both of us to leap outside. So she disappeared from sight and a moment later fit the screen back into place.

I trotted around to the side of the cabin where the door was, and tried unsuccessfully to sneak back inside. The screen door squeaked every time it opened, and so my mom called to me from the kitchen. "I didn't realize you'd gone outside," she said, and I played along. My palm and wrist were still hurting and I hunted down a tenser bandage, explaining it away as having landed funny when I jumped off the swing in the yard.

It hurt for days, but it was so very worth it.
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(This second is for buttonloops because while talking last night, I promised I would share the Squash Shoes story.)

This last fall I participated in GISHWHES (Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen), which you've probably heard me mention before. One of the items on the list was to create a video, no more than 30 seconds long, of someone running down a busy street in shoes carved out of squashes. Originally, the plan had been for Jay and I to complete this task together, but our schedule fell through and suddenly I had two gourds and no model.

So when Sunday came around, I convinced Kez to run in the squash shoes. My cousin had come over that evening to join us for dinner, and before we knew it, the entire family was sitting around the table taking turns carving away at these squashes. It was especially entertaining because my family never does anything for Halloween, which means we don't have any experience with carving pumpkins. But we succeeded in cutting a circle for the ankle, and hollowing out both squashes, and cutting another oval at the toe because the shoes would otherwise be too short. Then, after wrapping plastic bags about my sister's feet, we stuck them into the shoes.

It was absolutely ridiculous and we were all howling by that point. Originally, I'd been hoping to wait until the next day to film when there would be more light, but it was clear that we wouldn't be able to remove them from Kez's feet and replace them the next day without causing damage to the shoes. So my dad hoisted her up onto his back to the door and we all grabbed out coats and winter boots and ran outside to film her jogging.

Here's the video:



The best part is that at the time, my neighbour two doors down from us was also one of my marketing profs. He pulled up to his house right when we were in the process of jogging down the sidewalk in the dark in the dead of winter - and filming the entire process - while laughing like a pack of hyenas. I don't know what he must have thought, haha.

The shoes had begun to split the moment my sister started running. As soon as I told her the video was done, she took off back to the house, bits of gourd trailing behind. The rest of us were still laughing too hard to breathe, but we managed to collect as many squashed squash pieces we could find on the way back.

When we entered the house again, the remains of the shoes were on the front rug. Of my sister, there was no sign.

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And the moral of both of these stories seems to be that my sister is a super good sport about everything, hahaha.