One misplaced garden hose… one split second…. one completely unexpected journey.
Sometimes the smallest things change the course of our lives.
If someone had told me that a garden hose and a bag of mulch was about to change my life, I would have laughed.
Saturday, May 23, 2026, was a beautiful day. The sun was shining, the temperature was in the mid-70s, and I was looking forward to spending the evening with eight friends, that I work closely with.
We meet once a month for dinner, and when it’s my turn to be hostess, we meet at Tasha and Kevin’s house.
The kids travel a lot and I house sit, so we plan around when they’re gone. That’s beside the point… but it explains where I was and why I was the only one there.
Dinner was planned for 6:00. I had ordered 2 racks of ribs with all the fixin’s, from Art’s BBQ and had picked them up at 4:30. I pulled in the garage, turned the key off, went around to the passenger side door, grabbed the coleslaw and barbecue sauce.
As I turned toward the door, my foot caught on something… a garden hose on the garage floor with an open bag of mulch sitting on top of it.
I had no idea that evening was about to take a very different turn.
The next thing I knew, I was falling. Everything seemed to happen in slow motion, yet it was over in a split second.
Broken glass, coleslaw, and what I thought was blood, turned out to be BBQ sauce, all over me and the floor.
Oddly enough, my first thought wasn’t, “I’m hurt.”
“Oh great… what a mess. At least the ribs are still okay!”
Then the pain hit…not gradually… instantly… a solid 10 out of 10.
I realized that my left arm wasn’t working.
I lay there on the garage floor, trying to figure out what had happened and wondering how I was going to get up.
The handle of the car door was the only thing I could reach, so with my good hand, I pulled myself up. Somehow, I made it into the house, and sat down at the kitchen table and waited.
A few minutes later, when the guests started showing up, there I was hunched over the table.
One of them, Jeremy , a retired paramedic. Took one look at me, asked what happened, as he gently began feeling across my shoulder.
When he reached that one particular spot, I jumped.
“I’m pretty sure you’ve broken your clavicle. We need to get you to the E.R.”
Several hours later, the doctor confirmed, that he was right… I had broken my left collarbone.
They put my arm in a sling, gave me some pain meds, and sent me home.
On the drive to the hospital all I had thought about was everyone back at the house.
I hated leaving them with the mess… and having to finish setting up dinner. But I should of known they would be perfectly fine and perfectly capable of handling everything.
And, sure enough, by the time I got home from the hospital, everything was cleaned up and everyone was gone. And wouldn’t you know it… they’d eaten every last rib! Oh well!
Sometimes life doesn’t just interrupt the plan… it completely rewrites it.
That Saturday afternoon started with a dinner party and ended with a trip to the emergency room.
I’ve learned something over the last 80 years… as long as God gives me another sunrise, He isn’t finished writing my story.
And that also means if you’re here… He’s not finished with yours either.
