If you’ve read my first blog post, you know I hinted that this next chapter of my life started with a garden hose and a bag of mulch.

Well, here’s the story. 

It was May 23, 2026.

I had been to the grocery store to pick up a couple of things for the dinner party I was having that evening at my daughter and son-in-laws house.

I opened the door, grabbed the sack of groceries, turned around to go inside and never saw them:

• A garden hose.
• A bag of mulch.

Right in the middle of the garage floor.

I caught my foot on the hose, stumbled, and went down hard.

So hard, my head bounced off the concrete and I landed squarely on my left shoulder.

The pain was immediate.

I just laid there trying to catch my breath.

My left arm was useless.

There was broken glass,  potato potato salad, and what I thought was blood, turned out to be BBQ Sauce, all over me and the floor.

I believe that every problem has a solution, but at that moment, lying there on the garage floor… by myself,  I began to wonder if that was true! 

For several minutes I  just there, trying to catch my breath and convince myself to ignore the pain and just move. So I took a deep breath,  managed to get up and make my way into the house.  Forget the mess, just get in the house.

My guests all got there about the same time, took one look at me and started laughing.

But, it just happens that one of them is  a paramedic. He took one look at my shoulder!

“That clavicle is broken. Come on, we’re going to the emergency room.”

Several X-rays later, the doctors confirmed, that he was right… I had broken my left clavicle.

They put my arm in a sling , gave me some pain meds, and sent me home.

Over the next few days, what surprised me most wasn’t the pain.

It was discovering how much I depended on my left hand.

I’m left-handed, and suddenly almost everything became an adventure.

• Taking a shower or washing my hair
• Getting dressed.
• Going to the bathroom and pulling up my pants.
• Closing the car door.
• Putting toothpaste on the toothbrush.
• Trying to sleep without rolling onto my shoulder.
• Writing my name or anything with my right hand… I needed a Big Red Writing Tablet to practice. It looked like 1st grade penmanship.

And speaking about writing… my friend Steven informed me “that writing  right handed isn’t hard at all… it’s just that you’ve been writing wrong all this time.  Don’t beat yourself  up over a simple lifelong mistake”.

You don’t think about those little things until you can’t do them.

When you do something really stupid, natural instict is to blame someone else.

So, I blamed my SIL, Kevin.   None of this would’ve happened if he’d  put away the hose and mulch away before I got there.

Without missing a beat, His “comeback” is “No…I actually saved your life”

Sometimes life changes because of something as ordinary as a garden hose lying on a garage floor.

At that moment, I thought I was just dealing with a broken collarbone.

I had no idea that this simple fall was opening the door to a chapter of my life I never could have imagined.

And just for the record…  Kevin is the most wonderful SIL that a woman could have!

We’ll pick up the story there… keep reading.