Walking Barefoot on the Barbed Wire
Pushing the boundaries
I see now that it’s become almost invisible, though if you look carefully between my fingernail and the edge of my boot (and ignore the stretch marks on my knee) you can see a tiny trace of what used to be the worst scar on my left leg. While I was comatose in 1988, my body did some intense healing, but that’s an entirely different story and if you follow my writing you’ve already read some of it.
Let’s get back to that itty bitty scar and how it involves walking on barbed wire fences. Ravyne Hawke inadvertently prompted this when she spoke about setting boundaries in her essay about Moonology Answers to Burning Questions. For much of my life, I’ve tested the boundaries whenever I could. Before I could talk, I understood that they’re more often made of string than of brick, and in a desire to stick to the rules as they are rather than as they’re stated, I’ve found it necessary to figure out how far that substance will stretch.
I was very young when I got that scar. My sister and I were walking across our grandparents’ ranch. We had been warned to be very careful near the barbed wire fences. Of course we knew exactly where they were. When we needed to cross one, I would hold the wire down so she could cross it, then she would do the same for me. I was between 5 and 8 years old when one of us got…
