My husband fell on the ice at the bottom of the driveway in January, breaking his collarbone. The recovery period was 10-12 weeks. He was functional well before that, but changing the mailbox decoration, where he has to get up on a ladder to get a decoration from off a hook in the shop, maneuver the heavy metal decoration down, carry it out to the truck, then get the current one off the mailbox and the new one on, and then store the now unused decoration was more than I wanted to THINK about, much less DO.
The decision was reinforced when our dog, Amber, pulled him down while she was on the leash, making him fall headlong into one of our brick planters, slashing the back of his ear and dislocating his little finger almost exactly one month ago. His ear is still healing from the injury and the 8 stitches needed to stop the bleeding.
Yesterday he brought up the subject of changing the mailbox decoration.
He chose this one to put up – Wile E. Coyote, Sonic the Hedgehog, and the Roadrunner, with Sonic accepting money from Wile E. for catching the Roadrunner and giving him to the coyote.
This decoration was fun and challenging for us. It was the first time we tried to do a more 3-D decoration, with the legs of the Roadrunner made from rebar. You can see on the back of this piece where I tried to blend the support piece into the painting of the figures.
My husband spent some time out in the shop after we put up the decoration yesterday. When he came in, he said he had a really bad time trying to put the Happy New Year decoration back up on its hook in the shop, and decided it was really too big and heavy and unwieldy to use again.
As we age, we’re trying to make some decisions as to what is important and what isn’t in the grand scheme of things. We like putting up the decorations on our mailbox, but will now stop putting up ones that are too difficult and might result in one or both of us getting hurt. The Happy New Year one is the first on the list not to use again. We do have another decoration of Calvin and Hobbes where they are hugging each other, that we can use in place of the Happy New Year one.
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