Hellish Night, Sweet Morning

A little ill fortune befell me earlier this week. I am not so steady on my feet anymore, especially after sleeping, so I fell, after sleeping a couple of hours, and got whacked on the left side of my head hard by landing on the sharp edge of a solid wooden door frame.

This little spill left a large, ugly, bright red mark on my neck that ran the whole length of the left side of my jawline clear past the top of my earlobe. I look like someone has tried to murder me. (And I don't even know how I'm going to explain this one to my mother).

Being in so much pain, I thought I had better get myself to the one place that I have been avoiding for many years-our local emergency room. And to make matters worse, it was midnight, and I do not like to drive after dark. It was a hellish night.

But after a technician administered an emergency CAT scan, and a nurse took my vitals, the doctor declared me to still be in one piece, and he dismissed me.

Then came the morning. I had been caring for someone's lost and very shy dog for a few days by feeding him and talking to him, and finally, I got his trust enough to get close to the hungry mutt to pet his head and get the contact information on his tag. He had been my guest of honor for nearly a week, and he was big, and I just could not afford to feed him much longer so this was good news.

I telephoned his rightful owner, but the man could not quite believe that I had found his dog because the precious pooch had been missing for "a month and three days" and the man had written him off as dead.

After being convinced that I indeed had his dog, he zipped over to my place, materializing almost instantly.

When he arrived and the canine got a whiff of his scent, the dog danced and cried; the man cried, and I cried. We all cried. It was a sweet morning.

Hey, God always calls the sun forth from behind the angry vapors of a stormy night to make a sweet morn. And a sweet day it is indeed.