This happened more than a week ago, but bear with me.

So, I am a carpenter. And my father-in-law, well, he kinda tries his hand at everything.



In my wife's parents's yard there is this old wagon, which they've turned into a flowerbed, seen above. It has been there since forever it seems, and everyone who gets married in the family have their pictures taken beside the wagon (you can make out the edge of a wedding dress on the right of the photo that I cropped out). I would say there are 20+ women in wedding dresses pictured before this wagon.

Well, the wagon is wood, and then there is dirt in it with flowers, and the flowers and dirt get watered and everything holds the wet in. The vehicle was in a state of decay, rotting down, but the family wanted to keep it there, so the father-in-law had a look at repairing it. He called me up to come over to the house to look at it and see how we could make it right.

We had a look together, and I was thinking up ways to go about it without just remaking the whole thing, but I had to go and work on some other job, so I told the father-in-law I'd get back with him. He thought he had enough of an idea, and said he'd get started without me anyway, come back when I could.

I left, and about 30 minutes later, the mother-in-law heard what she thought was an explosion, a huge boom. Turns out the wagon was even more ripe than we had thought, and when he was poking around underneath it, some of the wooden spokes gave way and the right rear wheel slipped out and smashed my father-in-law's gob something awful.



Well, this man says he's had over 1000 stitches in his lifetime, and I've no doubt it's true. He split his upper lip clean up underneath his left nostril and got himself 30-odd more stitches on that day. It kinda curved up that way, in a little backwards 'c', cuz you can't really tear skin straight-like, at least not on accident.



Now, if you've had this much stitching up and so little regard for pain as my father-in-law has, maybe the following makes more sense, but I was always horrified when I'd hear my wife mention it: you can't always sew yourself back up, but you can always save on another doctor visit be taking out your own stitches. That's his saying, and so he always does, he had always taken them out of my wife when she was a little girl too, and so that's why she thinks that this might be normal. He'd already had plenty of practice on himself, even back then, when she was little.



So that's what he did this time too, only it seems he forgot to count how many he'd pulled out, or maybe he miscounted, or at least something like this is what he thought happened when about a week after he had tugged out his own stitches, his face started swelling up. Must have missed on of the damned things, or something, so he thought, and he grudgingly went back to the doctor, much to the relief of his wife.

When he came home that day he had a smirch on his face, and he held out a long splinter. Where do you think I found this, he says. His wife knows how he is, so she didn't even try to guess.

(It was this long, the splinter)

Being the bloody mess that he had been when he went into the emergency room the first time, something had been missed. The pressure of the wheel slamming into his face had been so great, a clean splinter of wood, 5 and 1/4 inches long, went up his left nostril into his nasal cavity, and then had stayed there, doing no harm, for over two weeks. At two weeks it started to become infected, rotting in his head there between his eyes just like the wagon was rotting in the backyard.

He kept that splinter at the house for a while and would bring it out and show it to people who came over and tell the story and laugh about it, but my mother-in-law finally made him throw it away because it was so disgusting.

Last week I helped him, and we got the wagon back up and all fixed and secured. Just in time too, my mother-in-law says, somebody's getting married in July.

-Joe