So I am biking home from the women’s clinic, slowly, against the wind, with my throbbing kidneys, when I get the phone call. It’s hard to answer the phone while biking, I think, there’s enough going on without having to flip open the phone and field a call.

My kidneys are not happy. They have been trying to deal with this bladder infection that has plagued me for two weeks. My temperature scoreboard rises and falls as the kidney team falls in the mud and then struggles onward. I push along towards home with my antibiotics stowed in my purse and my phone ringing in my front basket.

Okay, what is it? I answer the phone while pedaling, bumping over the curb and onto the sidewalk. Eldest daughter, Laura, is calling me.
“Elsa fell out of a tree at school,” she says.

“Oh, great.” I think, “How are we going to get her to the hospital with no car?” Maybe I was supposed to think, “The poor dear…” But this mom is dealing with too much right now. “If she’s gone and hurt herself,” I fume, “I’ll break her skinny arm.” No, of course, I wouldn’t but I just don’t want her to have any more accidents. She’s already been in a cast and on crutches several times. Once she was dancing on rollerblades, once someone stepped on her hand. She fell out of a tree before, at the beach with grandma and pa. She fell on her head that time and couldn’t walk for a few hours; but that didn’t knock any sense in to her apparently.

“Actually, I jumped out of the tree,” explains Elsa, after she has been dropped off at our house by one of our kind car-endowed friends.
“I was trying to jump onto the top of the wall from the branch, and I slipped.” Of course, she slipped, she’s not a cat.

I am sorely chagrinned. I thought I had trained her better. Whenever we climb trees together, I go over the rules: always have at least one solid handhold and one solid fooothold; never trust a dead branch; branches are strongest near the trunk; when jumping out of a tree, hang and drop or make sure you land on level solid ground. I don’t climb trees as often as she wants me too, because usually, there are too many people around, and you know what they are going to think of a 44-year-old sitting up in the branches. Someone that old in a tree is obviously out of her tree.

“You shouldn’t worry about what people think of you,” she counsels wisely. “You should just be yourself…and you’re still kind of a kid.” OK, but do I want grown-ups to know that?

My mom climbed trees well into her forties; we went for walks in the woods and we climbed trees. When Grandma Gilmore was a little girl, she fell out of a tree onto her head; almost bit her tongue in half. Of course, she was hanging from her knees on the bottom branch when she fell. When her tongue healed up, she went back to climbing trees. She is the shortest in her family of 13 siblings and calls herself “the low point.” Maybe she had to climb trees to get a bit of height. Climbing trees gives you a new perspective on life; it sure did a lot for Zaccheus.

“Are you still mad at me?” Elsa asks sweetly from the couch where she is icing her sore knee. “I forgive you,” I say, “but no more tree climbing unless I am with you.” I don’t want her dropping from the trees like a piece of ripe fruit if I’m not there to catch her. Besides, I need a good excuse to go climbing again.