Cut away from you...

 I guess "cut away from yourself" is the perfectly proper instruction and it makes perfect sense.  Something sharp going away from your other hand is obviously safer than something sharp coming your way.  Somehow I remember my Grampa, Ed Becker giving me that instruction way back when. Can't remember the project or the tool exactly but I remember those words: Cut away from you...
So how many times have I disregarded or forgotten that simple piece of wisdom? And how many times has it actually resulted in an injury?  I guess somewhere in Gods accounting of my life there is a ledger of the less important but helpful guidelines that I willfully or thoughtlessly disobeyed. This time it was with a pair of garden shears.  The good kind. Fiskars. A brick wall borders the side yard and a very

healthy climbing vine covers it.  My task every three or four weeks is to trim the vine away from the siding above the brick. Weather and other factors had kept me away from the task a little longer than usual so I had a fair amount of trimming to do last Saturday afternoon.  Growing very close to the brick and with an adhesive quality that deserves respect the vine was stubborn enough to require prying the vine away, them trimming. The bottom blade of the shears are just a little too thick to easily pry the vine away. On one particular pass, I missed the vine one way so I doubled back with the shears in my right hand toward my left, which was helping steady me on the small step stool that gave me just enough height to trim comfortably. Suddenly I found out just how sharp the shears were by missing the vine again and slicing the ring finger, wedding ring finger, on the side, just above the distal interphalangeal joint (I would have called it my finger knuckle). And it was not a question of if it would bleed, but how much. Putting the shears down I went inside to the kitchen sink, ran it under cold water, and let it bleed.

And bleed it did. A red cascade flowing from your finger is pretty in its own way.  Checking on me at the sink, my lovely wife expressed her concern, and I blithely said "letting it bleed is the best thing for it".

A minute or two later I wrapped the wound in a paper towel and tried to control the bleeding before applying a bandage. After a few minutes of having it elevated and bandaged I put on a work glove and went outside to complete my chore.  I was quite surprised that the bandage was adequate to control the bleeding in such a short time, and back at it, working with my hands above my shoulders, the wound really didn't hurt anymore.

Between writing this post and now the vine has been removed and replaced with a polyethylene equivalent. No more ladders, no more trimming, which seems the wise solution.