The Powell Series of Unfortunate Events

Part One: The Barn

Although the barn had a significant impact on our childhood play it also was a place that fostered a few of the grander Powell children accidents. Accident could be too light a word for these however. Let me rephrase them as “catastrophes.”

The first was not my own. It belonged to Evelyn, the second oldest girl. Evelyn was another scabby-kneed child with an unfailing sense of adventure and a ferocious passion for the outdoors. So it was to be expected when my mother said one thing, the young Evelyn did the very opposite.

“No playing in the barn!” My mother was a nervous hen, always calling out to the boys when they climbed too high in the great oak tree in the side  yard or shushed us when we screamed “bloody murder” for any reason but.  

“My nerves are shot,” my brave mother would report at the end of a long summer day. Bless her heart. At the time, we never realized how much strain we all caused from rough housing.

Evelyn had decided that day that she was indeed going to play in the barn.  I wish I could recap exactly what happened that afternoon underneath the barn, but I know very little.

From what I remember, Evelyn had been playing underneath the main floor of the barn where all kinds of fun items were. There were hay stacks with pitchforks, stone walls, and leaf piles with hidden pieces of wood underneath. And there were also doors—doors with glass windows—that also hid beneath fantastic climbing obstacles.

I was in the house when I heard a ruckus in the kitchen. I ran to find Evelyn sitting on the kitchen floor, her knee a gaping wound, with bright white specks scattered in the crevasse of blood. I was horrified. But, I also remember being extraordinarily intrigued.  A funny thing was, I don’t think she was even crying.

Evelyn got to go to the hospital and get her knee stitched up—something entirely too cool for any of us kids to even feel bad for her. When she came home and showed us, we were even more jealous. Her stitching was in the shape of a question mark.

The second catastrophe did belong to me and my Irish twin, Joe. It was a gloriously bright day. I couldn’t have been much older than five years old. We, too, neglected to listen to the finger wagging of my mother.

Immediately behind the barn was a large woodpile. The barn had begun to fall apart over the years and that was where all the wood and debris had accrued.  We had been so well versed playing on that wood pile that we knew exactly where to avoid: the rusty nails, the tight holes, and the rotted away wood. But, we didn’t know everything.

Joe was most likely leading me through a thick jungle dripping with the rainfall of summer. We were on the prowl for the ferocious lion, scared and excited all at once. We knew he was back there somewhere.

Suddenly, my foot stepped down hard on a loose piece of wood.

CRUNCH!

Before I knew what was happening, a swarm of bees had surrounded me, attacking every vulnerable part of my body—which was everywhere.  The angry cloud had found Joe, too, and were taking him down as well. Screaming violently, we tried to push them off of us and run away from the irate insects.

“WHAT’S GOING ON?” My father. He came bounding from the driveway and past the garden toward our screams. He had just pulled into the driveway from work and heard our cries. He picked us up, swiping the bees off our faces and necks, and sprinted toward the white farmhouse.

I lost touch with reality after being stung so severely. There is no memory between being saved from my Father and the ice cold bath I soon found myself in. We, too, went to the hospital. And we were even luckier than Evelyn. We got pink panther popsicles!

Part Two: Sam

 Sam is the youngest boy and second youngest kid in the clan. He was always getting his hands dirty and finding some sort of mischief. And he was always getting hurt one way or the other.

First there was Christmas about ten years ago. Sam was a little tyke at the time, about 5 years old. That year, my dad had bought a deliciously wide and tall tree. It filled the very back of the new addition, which would be later turned into the Family Room.  The tree was so big and bulky that my dad did a fantastically smart thing at the time—he wired the entire tree down to the floor. (The floor was still wood and hadn’t been carpeted yet.) So imagine a six-plus foot evergreen that was almost 5 feet across the middle wired down firmly to an unfinished floor. There were a lot of hidden candy canes that year.

Sam was playing beneath the tree, zooming a toy around the base. He was like a cat, enamored with the tree’s smell and being. Plus,. Being so small, it was as if he was inside his own little fort.

But, the safety of the “fort” did not last.  Somehow, someway, Sam achieved the impossible.  He caught himself on the wire, a piece shooting right through the top skin of his hand. He was stuck and there was no easy way of getting the poor kid off.

My mother, in her worrying haste, called my father. He was at his work’s Christmas party about 4 miles away. (My father works, and always has, for the local Sheriff’s Correctional Center.) He immediately came to the rescue like he always does and always will.  He cut the wire on each side of Sam’s hand and, once again, brought his child to the hospital.

Then there was Thanksgiving a couple years later. Holiday dinners are always an extremely bustling occasion in our home. Plates are shoved this way and that, kids are demanding food and being shushed, and laughter is erupting from every corner of the room.  Festivity crawls, walks, runs, flies, and zooms throughout every room. This is no different for the kitchen.

I just piled my plate high with turkey and mashed potatoes, heaped onto it a gleaming glop of golden butternut squash (my favorite!) and topped it all off with an amazing amount of gravy.  I was chattering excitedly about how many nuts I had cracked open and eaten before dinner (a Powell holiday tradition) when, without warning…

Sam came racing around the corner and flew right into my plate of food. The plate went flying and Sam went down. His forehead had connected right on the edge of the plate, leaving behind a truly impressive looking cut.  

I don’t think he’s going to ever let me live that one down. But it’s really just on par with his fate to find cuts and bruises.

Then there was the time that he was playing with our dog, Sally, in the back yard. Sally was a playful golden retriever that had been in our family for almost a decade. (We just recently had to put her down).  She was tied up to a zip line and racing back and forth with Sam.

And, as luck would have it, her line connected right with his neck, taking him down. Sally 1, Sam 0.

I suppose we can’t forget the time he was playing behind the barn (which, as you’ve learned by now, was not a lucky place). Falling from a tree, he fell and hit his head on a rck, drawing blood. The cool thing about Sam, though, is that he doesn’t seem to cry often. He came into the house, holding his blood in, and calmly told my mom what happened. No one believed him until he showed off the rock with blood on it beneath the tree.

Part Three:  Falling Sibling

Of course, there was an unspoken right-of-way into boyhood for the Powell boys. I’m pretty sure each and every one of them broke their arms at one point (or two). The greatest of broken arm stories belongs to Joe.

Right now, Joe is a placid and spiritual young man who is studying to be a preist in Rome. You would never know that would be his calling if you watched after him as a child. From all my playtime memories and what I know from what my mother has told, Joe was a wild child.

And there was one thing that Joe was always after: the big kids’ Game Boy.

For those of you that don’t know, the Game Boy was one of the first handheld gaming devices from   Nintendo. It was large and bulky and gray and the images were anything less than impressive. But it was the most fun toy to have crossed paths with the Powell boys.

My oldest brother, Mike, carefully hid his Game Boy from our younger, stickier hands. But Joe—oh dear old Joe— he could always find it. A fantastic young Powell trait is the power of sleuth since we were always after what the big kids had.  And Joe’s nose could sniff out those Game Boys.

Mike finally thought he had Joe tricked this one particular day. He had hidden his Game Boy at the very top of a large bookcase. To the youngster, that bookcase was like the Tower of Babel. There didn’t seem to be a top in sight and you knew it couldn’t be a good thing.

That didn’t stop Joe. He began the climb to the top of the bookshelf, grabbing his way toward the prize. As soon as he reached the top and his dirtied fingers clasped the gamer, the bookshelf began to tilt. And, as fate would once again have it for a young Powell, he fell, Game Boy in hand, resulting in a broken arm. And once again, a young Powell got to see the inside of a hospital.

Then, and finally since these stories might make one think there was only chaos within the Powell walls, there was the time I was playing alone in Joe’s room. He had his room set up just right so that you could jump from his bed to the dresser to his desk to the windows to the play chest to his bed again and never have to touch the floor.

I was doing just that, pretending that I was escaping the cracking and snapping jaws of really mean alligators.  

Just above the toy chest, there was a shelf that one could easily grab onto for support. On that shelf was a green-filled terrarium. In it, a large branch lay lazily on the floor and curved upwards. Hidden underneath the coolness of the wood were two very pleased geckos.  They were the most adorable creatures I have ever seen—I think that now, in my adulthood, I want to have some as friends in my home.

But, on that day, they did not want to be my friends in the slightest. As soon as I rounded the room for the fourth or fifth time, I lost my blance on the edge of the toychest. Frigtened about falling, I grabbed the closest thing I could for support—the terrarium. I flew backwards, taking the glass terrarium and  the little lizards inside with me. The glass case crashed and broke into a million pieces and sent the little animals flying. 

Luckily, I landed far from the glass and didn’t have a scratch. But I did feel terribly about breaking Joe’s terrarium.