Catch Me When I Fall Read Online Free PDF Page A

article begins, “Obviously, drastic measures are needed, but not everyone can quit habits cold turkey. Here’s how to start.” Then a chart lists environmental sins on the left (“If You Do This”) and correctives on the right (“Try This”). The transgressions include using plastic bags to bring home groceries, buying fruit grown in Mexico or snack food from Wisconsin. Leaving toaster ovens and televisions plugged in, driving the car even when the distance is short. Applying chemical cleaners. Running the washing machine when the load is not full.
    Even though I want to kick Peter, I feel a bit of sympathy as I scan the list. No wonder he’s so frustrated with us. I move aside the lace curtain on the bathroom window to gaze at the snowy field on this side of the house. When Bertha Armyworm invaded the canola last year, Peter lectured Dad about this field. Told him he shouldn’t be using Roundup, let alone Decis, this close to the house. Dad isn’t much for arguing—we’re similar in that way. He voiced something obscene in Dutch and slunk out to the barn. But he left the field fallow last summer.
    Wandering into the kitchen, I wait for Mom to finish cleaning the mudroom. She’s breathing heavily, and the metal dustbin clatters as she wallops the floors with the broom. I snatch an oatmeal cookie from the tin on the counter and stay out of her sight. Maybe when she’s done, I’ll explain to her what I see. What I now understand about Peter. I plan my words. “Mom, to Peter, the world is like a high school gym class volleyball team. Everyone has to play, but only a few people care. And some are disastrous. Obstructive. That’s why Peter has to work so hard at saving the earth. Because of people who don’t. People like his own family who won’t even switch to energy-saving light bulbs.”
    I reach for another cookie and chew it more slowly than the first. Mom would just recoil from the idea of Peter trying to atone for her shortcomings. I don’t think I could make her understand.
    She thunders into the kitchen with a dustbin surprisingly empty for the amount of noise she was making with the broom. I move to the table with another cookie, avoiding eye contact. “I’m going to clean upstairs now,” she says with brimstone in her voice. “It’d be nice to get a little help.” She stomps out with the vacuum cleaner.
    Moving slowly, I pull out a dust cloth and the Pledge from the broom closet, thinking about Peter’s world view. The chart bothers me. There is something skewed about it. It needs more columns, or at least one more: “Damage Control: How to fix the things you break as you’re trying to repair the world.”
    I return to the cookie tin. Outside the kitchen window, the branches of the poplars are bare and intertwined, like roadmaps against the sky. When I was little, I used to love surveying our land from on top of the silo. I don’t climb it anymore. Fat twenty-one-year-olds can’t climb silos, at least not without attracting a lot of comment and probably laughter. But I know how the landscape appears from up there. So much perspective. A vast mosaic of fields in yellows, browns, and greens. On clear days, the faint smudgy shadows of the foothills far to the west. To the east, the prairie stretching farther than I have ever travelled. And Oma way on the other side of that prairie.
    I put the cookie back. Something is changing. An idea is growing. I have some problems to solve, because I spent a lot of money on the bogus diet powder and on the bridesmaid dress in the past couple of months. But my idea makes me feel light enough that I don’t care what the bathroom scale said this morning.
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    I drove to Red Deer right after breakfast today. Dad and Mom are going to have to travel the forty minutes in the car to pick up the truck after I call home, but I