Miraculous things happen in the human body when danger threatens. I defended my family in a gray bathrobe with too big sandals on their feet, writes Merituuli Saikkonen.
Sea wind Saikkonen
Doorbell plays in the most awkward moment possible, in the middle of the sauna. The children sat in a foam bath and placed tall foam cones on their heads, I stood in the shower. The doorbell rang stubbornly, so I wrapped a scanty bathrobe around me and watered the water to open the door.
Behind the door stood an old man from a neighboring house, whom we called Santa because of his white beard.
“There’s a man on your roof,” the neighbor said.
“What???” I replied.
In the movie Jungle Book is a scene where the scary and power-hungry Shere Khan tiger appears in the home cave of wolves to scare little puppies. The wolf mother pushes the puppies into the cave, commands her to stay there and encounters herself a many times larger tiger. Now that wolf mother was me. Not in a gray turkey, though, but in a gray bathrobe.
I walked back to the bathroom. I told the kids I was going to help the neighbor a little bit and I’ll be right back. The children had progressed in foam games to foam beards.
I slipped my bare feet into the only shoes that felt suitable at the time: my husband’s sandals, which were way too big for myself, and pressed into the yard with a neighbor.
And true, our snowy roof had a man in jeans and a red hoodie. He slid towards the edge of the roof and jumped from the roof to the balcony. My body fluttered, and I cried out: God bless the man, get off our roof! Off our balcony!
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“TU-LE ALAS!” “TU-LE IMMEDIATELY DOWN!” And so he came.
Human miraculous things happen in the body when danger threatens. Man – or the wolf – finds in himself strength and courage whose existence he did not even know existed. Behaviors and all kinds of learned humanity give way when an animal takes power. The body tunes into an escape or fight mode. The heart beats faster and harder. Blood escapes from the skin to the muscles. The bronchi and eyelids dilate. Digestion slows down.
The moment I stood in my own yard on a frosty bridge wrapped in a bathrobe with bare feet in sandals, I found my own inner cop. I had seen a few times how the police were commanding a person, and I had been in a situation where a flight attendant ordered a man who had risen to stand in the middle of a landing. “SIT DOWN!” the flight attendant shouted clearly and purposefully, several times. Finally the man sat down.
The intruder had advanced to the balcony railing. The drop to the ground was several meters and his landing boots were open. “TU-LE ALAS!” “COME IMMEDIATELY!” “TU-LE ALAS !!”
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The man did not know where he had come from or where he had been on his way.
And so he came. The man jumped to the ground from the other end of the balcony, where the fall was not dangerous. “They’re chasing me,” he said, staring at me. “Who?” I asked. “They.” The man did not know where he had come from or where he had been on his way. He was looking for his friend’s home. Terraced house. “Get out there,” I said, asking if he needed clothes. The man did not need clothes, but wanted a phone. “I won’t give it, but I’ll call you for help.” The man contented himself with the answer and started running in the direction my hand was pointing.
The neighbor’s man continued the evening’s pee run with his dog. I went back to the shower. The blood returned from the muscles to the skin. The kids asked where I was. “Helping a neighbor,” I replied. The hair was then washed so that the shampoo did not get into the eyes.
The author is the editor-in-chief of HS Our Family magazine and the forerunner of HS’s lifestyle editorial.
The column is published in the January 2022 issue of HS Our Family.
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