Howling at the.....sun?

Do you remember when you were younger and your friends always tried to talk you into the stupidest of things? Like on "A Christmas Story" where the kid gets his tongue stuck to the frozen poll because his friends triple dog dared him to? I think that every kid has to go through this kind of stuff at one point.

The one I remember quite clearly, is the time that I was dared to climb up a fallen tree onto the roof of a garage.

See, I don't know about you, but when I think back on this whole idea, I think that the words "fallen tree" make the whole thing a bad idea. What you don't know--because I haven't told you yet, obviously--is that the fallen tree had landed on the roof of a garage that was on an abandoned property.

When I was younger, all of my friends and I loved to play in the creek. We built a "clubhouse" on one of the banks on the creek (which consisted of the flimsy wood from cheap entertainment centers that we found thrown out with the trash), caught frogs in the creek and brought them home, and would spend long periods of time covered in poison ivy and mosquito bites because we played in the creek.

I guess you could have called me a tom-boy. You can also assume, based on this information, that the fallen tree's base was in the creek. This same tree also happened to have destroyed the clubhouse that was right next to it.

As we are contemplating the wreckage of our dearly departed clubhouse, one of my friends happens to notice that the tree that caused the problem was propped up by the slowly decaying garage of the abandoned house nearby. This friend also happened to be a couple years older than the 7 and 8 year old girls that he hung out with and, perhaps because of this, had a habit of tormenting us girls.

And so it began. The dare was put in place and I was the only girl out of the three of us that didn't chicken out. I was steered right in front of the diagonal base of the tree and had my jaw set. I started to climb up the large tree, having trouble because it was almost completely bare of branches and bigger than I could wrap my arms around.

Basically, I looked like a mentally challenged monkey trying inch my way up this giant fallen log.

As I got to the top of the tree and stepped onto the roof, I noticed three things.

1) The part of the roof I was on was the only part that hadn't completely collapsed with decay

2) My friends had gotten bored with how long it took me to climb to the top and had ditched me

3) The only way back down was the tree, and the drop was a long way down which made me too nervous to try it.

So I was stuck. I couldn't climb to any other part of the roof for fear that I would fall onto the rusty metals that had been left behind in the garage. I couldn't climb down the tree for fear of falling onto the rocks in the creek below (and at some point I was terrified of getting a splinter from sliding down the tree). And, as I grew up in the 90's before cell phones were popular (my sister had a pager in high school), I had no way of getting help.

Now, this abandoned property was actually right in the middle of my neighborhood--and everyone had a close next door neighbor, so getting down or getting attention shouldn't have been as hard as it was. However, it was a hot summers day in the middle of Illinois, and no one was dumb enough to stay out in the heat--but the parents were all smart enough to kick their kids out in it so that the wreckage of playing indoors wasn't an issue.

But my friends had ditched me to go get their lunch, and I was alone. I started doing the one thing I could think of--yelling for help. But, for some reason, nobody could hear the sound of an 8 year old girl sitting on top of an abandoned garage. Perhaps it was the whir of their AC or the cable turned on inside of the house.

When yelling for help didn't work, I thought of what annoyed people in the neighborhood the most. I remembered that my father always complained of two things: people driving by with the radios on too loud, and the next door neighbor's dog howling all the time. As I didn't have a car, and I couldn't think of any good songs to scream, I decided to play pretend.

I started to howl like a wolf.

From my previous post, you have probably guessed that I have always been obsessed with Animal Planet and animals in general. So, naturally, I had practiced these sort of noises to mimic the animals I saw on TV. So I howled, and I howled, and I howled some more.

It was two hours later before I heard anyone respond, and that was the neighbor yelling at me to "SHUT UP" before slamming his glass door shut and going back to whatever he had been doing previously.

By the time I had howled for 4 hours, I was tired, hot, thirsty, and my throat probably couldn't take much more howling. I curled up and whimpered for a few minutes before I heard my friend's mother, "Amanda? Is that you, up there?"

She was livid. Her daughter, Sam, had just finally gotten around to telling her mother what had gone on while they were eating dinner. She grabbed the ladder from her garage and propped it against the garage, climbing up and, after glancing at the caved in green tile of the roof, started to freak out.

She couldn't get me down, there was a creek on the back side where I was at and no one had a long enough ladder for that, and the only other side where the roof wasn't caged in was inaccessible due to that neighbor being a jerk and having a privacy fence.

So Sam's mother decided to call 911 and get a fire truck there.

It took forever, but finally the fire fighters were there, the long ladder from the truck allowing one guy to get over to me. I remember, distinctly, the man looking at me and saying, "You're not a fire." before he pulled me down to safety.

That house has now been completely renovated and a nice young family is living in it. I doubt they will ever know the story about the girl who howled at the sun.

The Day My Mother Fell Through the Ceiling

You know that one story from your childhood that no one ever seems to believe? Have you ever thought about maybe sharing it with people so that others can be entertained? I think that's just what I may do now. See, I came from a very strange family. My mother is Christian, my father is Buddhist with hardcore Christian parents, and I wound up Pagan--weird, right?

But none of that compares to the strange day when my mother fell through the ceiling.

When I was about 3 years old, we moved into a new house. It was a one story ranch house that looked more like a barn complete with unfinished basement and attic. After about two years, part of the basement was finished so that my sister could use the bedroom down there while I got her old room as my playroom. The playroom shared a wall with my parent's bedroom and, as a child who liked my privacy (as my sister was 10 years older than me), I liked to play with the door closed.

So one day I'm playing in the playroom, making my little toy lions chase down Barbie's horse and nom on it like the vicious creatures they are on Animal Planet, and all in all enjoying my little world when I hear the largest CRASH!BOOM you have ever heard in your life--unless you've heard a plane crash that is.

Suddenly, I hear my mom yelling for help and I rush out of the playroom thinking--in my infinite 5 year old wisdom--that I can become one of those awesome lions and save her with my mighty roar.

I think I may have watched too much Lion King.

I open the door to rush out and save my mother and am eye to eye with the largest dust bunny I have ever seen. I mean, I think the attic hadn't been cleaned since the house was built because this stuff was everywhere and about as tall at my 5 year old self. This slate gray, fluffiness of doom was the only thing that I could see that would make my mother yell for help, and it confused me. I didn't think for a moment that the giant dust bunny wasn't the source of the problem, so I whipped out my magic fairy wand and started to repeatedly bludgeon the stuff with it--pink sparkles and all.

I don't think it was until my father came running with my sister hot at his heels that I thought to look up. When I did I was in complete awe.

There was a leg coming out of the ceiling.

The scene from there went a little like this:

Mom's voice: "HELP!"

Dad: "Don't worry, dear, I'll help you!"

Me: "Whoa....." (*grabbing my sister's hand and tugging on it*) "Shannon.....is our house a monster?"

My sister: "No, you idiot, that's mom."

At that point, my eyes were as large as plates as I stared up out of the blackish fluff at the leg sticking out of the ceiling. I saw it wiggle when my mother yelled for help again and realized that my sister was telling the truth. However, it didn't cross my mind that my mother had been up in the attic and had fallen through, I seemed to think that the ceiling was somehow giving birth to a new version of my mother. That perhaps the ceiling was really an egg of some sort and that my mother needed to hatch out of it and that she would have awesome ceiling related super powers from this experience.

I was sorely disappointed, however, when I saw my dad pull the ladder down from the ceiling and go up into the attic to help my mother. As children, my sister and I were not allowed in the attic, but by looking up through the hole once my mother's leg was removed, we could see what was going on through a haze of blackish gray fluff.

Apparently, in the middle of spring cleaning, my mother thought it would be a good idea to move all of the Christmas stuff into the back of the attic, where there were no support beams or floorboards to walk on and support your weight.

Still today, I can walk into my parents bedroom and look up and the nice white square where the hole was and remember....I thought my ceiling was hatching my mother.