Stairs

While my main writing desire today is another topic, I cannot help but begin with my little girl. As of last night, she is heavier than she was when she was born. She has grown, from a tiny 3 pounds, 15 ounces, all the way to a monstrous 3 pounds, 15.5 ounces. Way to go baby girl!

Now I can move on to the day’s random thoughts.

It has been a very long time since I have fallen down the stairs! I came close a few weeks ago, but regained my balance and survived. Perhaps our stairs are too narrow; perhaps my propensity to fail under gravity’s spiteful force is rooted in my boyhood home, where I rarely used the only stairs, which led to the basement. Whatever the cause, I have a very violent and damaging history of changing elevations in our home. Today, I feel led to share a few of those horrific and traumatizing episodes with you.

Many of my falls have ended without any permanent damage being done to myself or my surroundings. However, a few scars remain. The most obvious one is near the stairs leading to our bedroom. I was casually walking down the stairs when I extended my foot too far beyond the lip of the next stair (that is usually how this happens, though I have been known to swing and miss at the next stair during my ascent, only to sprawl face first upon the carpet). My foot slipped forward, my arms went out and I went down. It wasn’t until a couple of days later that I noticed the damage I had done. There upon the wall, in testament to my clumsy feet, my elbow had left its mark – a two inch dent in the plaster. (Quite strangely, I had trouble figuring out what the dent had come from.)

The external scars from my most traumatic fall have faded, but the internal scars remain. Let me begin by saying that I enjoy doing a little woodworking. A small, arched piece of wood that holds three hanging candles has become one of my favorite pieces. However, this piece hides a dark and secret past. I tried a couple of different techniques in bending the wood to create the arch before finding a successful solution (cutting thin strips of wood and gluing them together around a curved form). One unsuccessful method I tried was boiling a semi-thin piece of wood to soften the fibers, then trying to bend it over a form. Wait, what was I talking about . . . oh yeah . . . falling down stairs. Sadly, these two stories are integrally intertwined. I took the large pan of boiling water from the stove and was moving it to my basement workshop. I was walking as carefully as I could, all the while thinking of how my friend had recently managed to pour boiling water all over herself. I seriously did not want to do that!!!

Well, I expect you can follow this story to its conclusion. The patchy, red burn marks have since faded from my chest, but the memory still burns as hotly as the water did that day. Oh how I hate gravity!