I hit my head twice yesterday—once, before the election was called and announced, and then later in the evening, before Biden’s acceptance speech.

Don’t worry—I haven’t signed any important papers or started walking sideways. But waking up this morning, I have a new respect for the momentum of a body in motion and other physics-y things.

The first slam happened during a spontaneous barn-cleaning after my morning walk. I’ve been eyeballing and side-stepping that project since July 2019 when I unloaded the last of the unsold items after closing down our antiques business. Old wicker chairs and vintage doors, school desks from the 50’s and wooden shutters all piled on top of each other after what I’m sure was an original plan to stack them neatly. Then of course we needed to get to the bales of straw underneath, and then Patrick bought more wood to turn in his studio and well, the pile grew, and grew more wobbly. A groundhog figured into the scene at some point, tunneling into the straw for who knows how long, and stunk up the place for a while when he died (you can see why I’d find other things to do around the house).

Anyway, yesterday morning. I was moving some five-gallon glass water jugs to a better place along the south wall of the barn next to an old goat birthing pen that’s now being used to store huge planks of rough-cut wood. I bent down to position the last jug and stood up strong and proud when my forehead connected solidly with the corner of a 2” x 10” slab of osage orange (in case you’re not aware, that’s some mighty hard wood). Even though I was wearing a lovely thick head wrap with crocheted unicorn heads over the ear flaps, the corner of that slab got me right above my left eyebrow where the head wrap stopped wrapping my head. I swayed from the impact for a second or two and stepped back, stumbling over a thick knot of dried mud and straw (why not get my entire body involved, right?). No blood, thank goodness, and I can’t remember if I said any Words, but my skin was scraped up a bit, as if I’d fallen off my bike without the training wheels as a kid and landed on my face. My vision stayed clear and my judgment sound (if not at least familiar), so I finished the project with a spectacular demonstration of truck bed loading, a tottering Jenga sculpture of items the Goodwill would be happy to see. I took my victory lap around to the back of the house where my boots and walking apparel were laid to rest for another day, and felt I’d earned my breakfast. Patrick slept through it all.

Allow me a quick head-related flashback moment. In the summer of 1996, I noticed a small lump above my right eyebrow. At first I barely paid attention. It didn’t hurt and my bangs covered most of it. But one afternoon (I have no idea why) I tapped it with my finger and became instantly violently ill. A consult with my family physician led to a CT scan and a referral to a neurologist. Neither of them were alarmed at the preliminary findings, but we decided on a borderline elective surgery to both remove and diagnose the lump. I still have the letter my family physician sent to the specialist as part of the pre-operative paperwork: “I have examined Ms. Adamshick’s head and found nothing of any significance.” Well. There you have it. Not exactly the kind of documentation I’ll be adding to my CV anytime soon.

The lump turned out to be a benign tumor on my skull that was growing both inward and outward. Surgery was successful, and I resembled a Q-tip for a couple of days, my head wrapped in a thick white gauze bandage. The surgeon filled the hole with some sort of cement and a small metal plate held in place by two screws. I can’t get MRIs (not that I’d want to anyway), and when the weather grows colder at the end of autumn, I can feel the rest of my skull reshaping itself around the site, a weird and reliable harbinger of winter I’ve learned to live with across the years.

I don’t think yesterday morning’s crash into the osage orange plank rattled loose anything too important, but right before dinner last night, I stooped down to pick up some bits of chopped cabbage that had fallen to the floor and when I came up, the top of my head slammed into the underside of the countertop, startling Patrick, who was rinsing dishes a mere six inches away, into a burst of unedited profanity (yes, Words). I reached up to check for fluid and headed to the bathroom to make sure my eyes were each in their respective sockets. We watched Biden’s acceptance speech without further incident, and I drifted off into a lovely couch-sleep before standing up more carefully than I ever have in my life to go upstairs to bed. I’d be safer there.

Did you know that there are over 100 different words available to us, to describe our heads or refer to them in some way? A few of my favorites include: conk, bean, nut, noggin, noodle and brainbox. I suppose I’d add melon and gourd to that list as we plan for next year’s garden. Whatever you call it, mine seems able to withstand a variety of knocks, from intentional to wildly unplanned (I can see a few of you nodding your own in growing awareness…“now I get it…now it all makes sense. Wasn’t her father a psychologist as well?”). No matter. I continue to be awed by the absolute resilience of the human body, in spite of all the ways I seem bent on compromising mine.