I visited the village blacksmith yesterday.
It’s basically that simple. Well…except for the fact that I burned my foot. And my hand. My hand first, and then my foot. And then my other foot. And my other hand. In that order—hand, foot, foot, hand. Not that the order is critically, vitally important to the story, but I thought you might like to know, because it is somewhat tremendously important.
I don’t know how it could have happened. I was just standing there, talking to the friendly blacksmith about blacksmithy things that I surprisingly know an enormous amount about and I saw a metal stick sticking out of a hot burny place filled with glowing orange hot glowy hot things—am I getting too technical?—and I didn’t want anyone to get stuck by the stick so I grabbed it with my hand to move it and I was surprised because it was surprisingly hot.
(It was then that I burned my hand, in case you are keeping track.)
I quickly let go of the hot stick to look at my hand and it fell on my foot—to be perfectly clear, the stick fell, not my hand. So, then, my foot twitched—as any foot is going to do in that situation—and the hot stick landed on my other foot.
(If you are counting, that’s a hand, a foot, and a second foot being burned.)
Well, at that point, I instinctively reached down to help out foot number two and grabbed the stick with my non-burned hand.
At this point in my retelling I’m remembering that I also burned my knee—but just the one—because I started to lift the hot stick off my foot and because of the heat I let go of it (the stick, not my foot) so quickly that it touched my knee and burned it.
It’s a lot to take in, I realize, so I won’t talk about anything getting burned twice, which happened, although I’m done mentioning it until I mention it some other time when I feel like mentioning it for whatever reason I have at that particular time. I’ll let you know.
Anyway, the story ends in a good way because I’m OK—nothing damaged at all—and the blacksmith actually apologized to me for laughing so hard under the circumstances and invited me back whenever I want.
I think I’ll wait a few days for another visit, and next time I’ll wear gloves…or at least shoes. Probably both. At the same time.
