Just as I stepped out onto my front steps, I had a premonition of chaos, of falling,

Next thing I knew I was in the air, pirouetting. I landed on my side, my right leg bouncing off a step, and in slow motion I saw a geranium in a clay pot falling over. I grabbed for it as I kept rolling left off the step that had broken my fall, tumbling into the flowerbed a couple of feet below.

Still reaching up for the falling geranium, I landed on the small of my curved back and kept moving, as though my back were the rungs of a rocking chair. (Curling to save the plant probably saved my back from landing flat -- there's not even a bruise there.)

But my calf muscle has a football injury, as though I were tackled by the step. It hurts to put weight on the right side of my foot, and it's impossible to get up from a chair without arms (such as a toilet) without pain.

It's RICE for me now -- Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation.

I'm using a cane I found tucked away in the house's only closet when I moved in. It's a crooked crook, hand-carved by an earlier resident, but I can't quite get the rhythm of distributing my weight to this "third leg," so I wince regularly.

Sitting in the dirt, the first thing I did after determining that nothing seemed broken was to repot the geranium.