Safety third

 The wind seemed to reach over the fence in our backyard to squeeze the hand of a tree limb. It held on like a practical joker with a buzzer concealed in its palm. The shrubbery in its midst appeared to be laughing at the gale-force grip until the wind-weakened branch gave way.

The limb tumbled and clattered against the house, scraping the clapboard until it came to an uneasy rest on the back porch where it blocked the door.

The noise had frightened the dog and dissuaded her from doing a lick of her morning business.

I can't say that I blame her. I didn't want to venture out, either. Especially not after the wind's eerie howls had kept me up through the night.

It puzzled me some that this canine of mine wasn't similarly deprived of her puppy dreams. But not enough to add three layers to my running attire and leave the house. Instead, I took some cues from her refusals to navigate around the fallen tree parts and switch my outdoor run to an indoor one.

The treadmill is not my best friend.

It "tread-spreads" in the limited space of my office, which shrinks to fit an edge of our guest room. Which, now that I think about it, are all just imaginary components of life right now as we know it.

But I digress.

This loud, heavy, second-hand treadmill has saved my psyche and my current 283-day running streak exactly seven times, but it has always frightened me.

The fact that the green "UP" arrow that allows for incremental acceleration is a thumb press away from "10" (unofficially known as the speed of 10-thousand-miles-per-hour-immediately) is a design flaw that on more than one occasion has nearly launched me into the proverbial “next week.”

For this reason -- and a single accident that didn't kill him -- I have forbidden my son from using the contraption at all. My daughter, however, continues to use the device for Home School Gym Classes as she has taken fewer risks and more courses at the School of MOther PROtection (SMOTHER PRO for short).

But even she has found less use for the stationary conveyor, which is why, upon finding its deck lowered on this most blustery of days, I didn't follow any of my own safety precautions.

I just hopped on and set the pace at a leisurely Four. Four and a half. OK, five.

I wasn't even playing with the buttons when I felt a strange pull on my right sneaker and then the immediate sense of finally (and frighteningly) being at my first rodeo.

Only I was the calf; lassoed by the strap of an unzipped gym bag that had been living, evidently, on the front bumper of the machine. The thing NOT strapped to me was the emergency clip.

It's a good thing my reflexes are still capable of acting independently of my mind. I managed to shift my weight into my arms and lift my feet off the webbing, shaking my foot free of the bag and all the items from it that had tumbled onto the belt and were now jettisoning against the wall behind me. A comedy of errors.

But unlike this tree falling on my back porch, no one was the wiser. I hadn't screamed or fallen. Nothing went thud. And because I put safety third, I didn't have to start over.