Falling through a snow-covered roof

Last time I wrote to you about close calls, and I promise you it will not be an ongoing series – besides, who wants any more close calls – not me! OK, but there was one really scary one I have to get out of my system, and it's a winter one.

A few years ago while I was still living upstate, during one of those so-called mega-maxi-cold winters, I was chasing the UPS man – or was it my Himalayan white cat, Blaze? – across the snowy landscape. I ran across the width of our large open lot, across my sister-in-law's property, and onto her neighbors’ property. Since all the ground was snow-covered, I could not distinguish that I had run onto the flat roof of an old garage carved into the hillside.

Suddenly, the roof gave way, and I was falling through it! As my body was heading downward into the black abyss, I tried to hold on and climb out like a stuntwoman. The crazy and miraculous part was that I did manage to pull myself up and out, in spite of having flunked the rope-climbing test in the most-hated gym class of my high school years!

Below me was a dark, dirty cement floor, bare except for a lone vacuum cleaner. (I don't like vacuum cleaners, either.) If I had hit that concrete floor, I would have surely been knocked unconscious and no one would have known I was there. It could have ended in tragedy if I hadn't clawed my way out, but I did!

However, there was one problem. I had dropped one of my favorite snowflake-embroidered Easy Spirit shoes into the pit as I fought my way out. I called Jeff at work and told him of my terrifying adventure in the cold, frozen tundra, and explained that he might have never seen me again. Being the gentleman that he is, he took me to Hibachi Steakhouse for dinner that night, because I needed to feel and see the flames of the barbecue fire, and have a shrimp thrown at me to catch in my open mouth. I needed something to laugh about, plus a Singapore Sling to calm my nerves.

But ... I kept lamenting my snowflake-embroidered shoe. No matter that my life had been spared by a rush of adrenalin super-strength. I talked Jeff into a crazy, clandestine heist/recovery mission, because the neighbors whose roof I almost fell through were not particularly friendly, and even a bit scary.

To illustrate, I was collecting money once from our neighbors who all shared a private lane up to our individual houses, and it had been recently paved. These particular neighbors did not respond to my money-collection attempts, but their dog used to come to my back door, smelling my gourmet cooking that wafted from my kitchen through the neighborhood. Nobody cooks like that these days.

This dog, aptly named Bandit, would turn and pose himself in the doorway like one of the old-fashioned, cut-out framed silhouettes of days gone by. He also wore a red bandana around his neck. I wrote out a bill for their share of the road paving and tucked it into his bandana, and after enjoying my treat he ran back up the hill to his house like the Pony Express. They paid the bill and even laughed about it.

So, I wanted to retrieve my shoe from the bottom of the garage and needed Jeff to help me. Would he go for it? Apparently yes, because when it got dark, we donned black clothes and ski masks. We took along a fishing pole with a hook and crept surreptitiously along the dark, icy street with flashlights to try and hook the stylish shoe from the crater. Alas, we could not spot the fallen shoe on the garage floor and had to abandon the mission. I ended up having to order another pair of identical shoes. It was like a skit on the "I Love Lucy” show of days gone by. "How do you get me into these things?" laughed Jeff later.

To make things worse, my daughter's boyfriend, who is a public defender like she is and likes to pull practical jokes, called me a couple of days later, saying he was Detective Clouseau and was investigating the heist of an exotic embroidered clog down the street. I didn't fall for it and asked for his serial number, faking him out.

I'm glad that I'm down here in flat Sussex County again, where snows melt fast due to the salty air from the ocean, and I now have an extra embroidered shoe in case something like that ever happens again. There are no hidden underground garages nearby, I hope, but maybe Wagamons Pond here in Milton provides some potential danger. But what if this time, it's the shoe for the wrong foot that I lose? I only have one extra, and it's a right one.