In the fifty-plus years that I’ve been doing yard work, I’ve never suffered more than the occasional minor cuts, abrasions and contusions that everyone who sticks their hands into blackberry bushes and places their heads in close proximity to power tools experiences from time to time.

My good luck nearly ended when I had a run-in with the chicken coop in our backyard.

I had gone out into the yard to quell a minor domestic disturbance among the six girls who inhabit the coop. I was in a bit of a hurry because I wanted to get back in the house to finish the Sunday paper before the afternoon’s sporting events came on. Before entering the coop on my errand of mercy, I’d ducked behind the coop to grab a rake I keep for fallen leaf or wood-chip disbursement emergencies. In this case, I ducked to keep my head out of range of the overhanging roof of the coop, a simple physical maneuver I have accomplished countless times over the years.

However, on this particular day, for reasons yet unknown to me, I neglected to keep my head ducked as it passed under the 2×4 supports holding up the roof. The result was a fairly high-speed collision between my forehead and the 2×4. Unlike the Roadrunner and my other cartoon heroes, I did not see stars after banging my head on the chicken coop. Instead, I saw total blackness for a couple seconds. A few more seconds passed before I could piece together where I was, what I was doing there, and why someone had hit me across my forehead with a 2×4.

My confusion faded within a minute or so, and I had the wherewithal to complete my chicken coop intervention mission and return to the house. I stopped in the downstairs bathroom and discovered that my forehead was bleeding and that the top layer of skin had been neatly removed leaving a patch of raw forehead almost exactly the size and shape of the business end of a 2×4. Having completed my forensic analysis of the events, I proceeded to rinse off the blood, dab the contusion with a tissue until the bleeding stopped, squeeze a bit of Neosporin on the cut and place an unobtrusive bandage over the whole mess.

The woman who is my wife was not home at the time I collided with the chicken coop, but was due home any minute, so rather than finish reading the paper or preparing pre-game snacks, I sat and devoted myself to concocting some explanation for the bandage on my forehead that would not make me appear in Wendy’s eyes like even more of an uncoordinated doofus than she already thinks I am.

My first clear thought was to come up with a plausible excuse for my injury that didn’t reflect poorly on me. I checked the news to see if there had been any reported earthquakes or aftershocks in the Puget Sound area that morning, my thinking being that perhaps I could suggest that I hadn’t really bumped into the chicken coop at all, but rather the chicken coop had bumped into me, propelled by irresistible tectonic forces. Just my luck, there was no handy earthquake to blame.

I considered claiming that I had raced from the house to the chicken coop to save our feathered egg-layers from a pack of marauding coyotes and had battled mano-a-mano with the beasts to protect the chickens from certain death. I toyed with adopting this scenario for a bit, but rejected it when I realized that alleging I’d been battling hungry coyotes would undoubtedly lead to me having to get a tetanus shot. Besides, on close inspection, my forehead injury did not bear any of the signs one would expect to see if they were inflicted by the teeth or claws of a coyote; it was pretty clear I’d suffered some strain of blunt-force trauma.

In the end, I confessed to Wendy that my injuries were self-inflicted and that I had incurred them in a nobly-conceived but poorly executed attempt to restore domestic order to the henhouse. My honesty drew a sympathetic response from Wendy as well as a half of the maple bar she happened to be carrying at the time, so all ended well. The chickens, by the way, seemed somewhat entertained but ultimately not impressed by my antics around the coop based on the couple of cackles I recall hearing during my brush with chicken coop death.

And please, no need to suggest I wear a chicken coop helmet the next time I’m working in the yard – Wendy beat you to it.

Tom Tyner writes a weekly column for this newspaper.