Real Trouble

Jus’ outside our kitchen door we had an upright freezer. It had been in the spot in the rumpus room since we first moved to the house.

Tommy Smith and I were playing around the neighborhood and I was going to show him a stash of girly magazines I had hidden in the attic. The opening to the attic, more a crawl-space than anything, was directly above the freezer.

As kids, we had a method for getting into the attic and it involved the freezer. First, we’d climb up on the bookshelf next to the freezer, climb on top of the freezer and then slip into the square hole to the crawl space.

However, on this one day I went to climb up into the attic, and I stepped on the door of the freezer. It popped open and I found myself doing the splits.

However there is only so far my legs would spread and I ended up flopping on the ground with a loud thwap-like sound. I hit with such force that it knocked the breath out of me.

Mom heard me hit the concrete floor and quickly stepped outside. All she could see was me, laying on the ground and Tommy ducking around the corner, laughing.

She asked, “What happened? Did he hit you?”

It took me a while to explain that I simply fell off the freezer while trying to get into the crawl space. Then I had to explain why I was going up there.

That’s where the real trouble started.