OH CALAMITY, CALAMITY!

 

It started as a good deed, kindly meant, ending in disaster.

My husband was not feeling well, so I sent him up to bed, as wives do.

After a goodly interval, I thought I would take up a tray with a bowl of tomato soup and a slice of buttered bread.

I set off, carefully, till I was one step from the last tread when my shoulder jerked and the bowl flew into the air and disappeared down the stairs, followed by the tray and slice of bread.

I clung on with desperation to the bannister rails, the rest of me dangling free.

Hoping my arthritis would allow me to hang on long enough to gain purchase before I followed the rest of the debris down into the hall: not nice at all.

My cries of anguish brought my husband from his bed to organise a rescue and try to get me to rest on the bed.

How could I? 

With tomato soup dripping where it ought not to, on carpets up and down, as well as on the stair walls. 

It even found its way with artistic bent through the spindles, to drip down the cupboard door in rivulets into the hall. 

Before making a last gasp spread with dramatic effect to paint the open kitchen door with bright red tomato soup and upset the normal very plain kitchen floor.

Looking at the complete disaster, I wailed at my good deed gone wrong. 

What to do, what to do? 

My young man came to the rescue. “Call Nick, our window cleaner man.”

I phoned and he said he would come around to see what he could do. “How bad is it?” he asked.

“Just awful!” was my reply.

On his arrival, he looked in and said, “It does not look too bad,” thinking I was a panicking female, till I said, “Come right in.” Only then was the extent of the disaster really seen.

“Oh my, you have made a really cracking job of it.” On every tread on the way down, spots and splashes of tomato soup could clearly be seen. 

The grand finale was the soup bowl upside down, leaving a spectacular tomato soup ring when retrieved from another part of the carpet in the middle of the hall.

It took hours of scrubbing and cleaning and, the next day, they came back with their big carpet-cleaning machine. 

Finally, the evidence of the catastrophe was erased from the scene.

However, my arms and torso are still complaining at being left dangling over the abyss in the hall. 

© 2023 Penny Wobbly of WobblingPen

Photo by Pixabay