Forty stairs down and forty stairs up carrying a book bag, an insulated lunch bag, a purse, a gym bag, and a thermos of strong, hot, black coffee. Down and up carrying enough packs to look like a Sherpa climbing Mount Everest. It’s getting to be too much for her.
She has become more of a hermit in these last few years than is good for her. She is afraid to venture off of her perch. Her health is a concern. She needs to get out and exercise. She is afraid of falling. She must move away from these stairs. She looks out at the trees surrounding her. Lately she has even been afraid to venture out on the deck. The winter months build a scum of muck and mold that makes even a flat surface treacherous.
On the river there just aren’t many places that are safe from the floods without the elevation of two or even three flights of stairs. The water gets high here. Not every year, but many times they have been an island stranded above the grey swirling water below. You have to be prepared to live here. You need supplies and water, wood and candles, flashlights and propane.
She does not want to leave this place – her little tree house in the sky. She cries with remorse and thinks of her great grandmother who had to leave her family home when a freeway claimed eminent domain on her property. How she must have felt walking through each beautifully hand crafted room at the age of ninety? Remembering three generations of children, grand children and great grand children being raised on the homestead…. What she was facing now was nothing compared to Gigi leaving the Big House.
Struggling with house payments, a plunging economy, a failed business, a layoff from the job she loved teaching the children of the community, and now leaving the town, and the little knotty pine house she loved… She will leave behind many memories. She does not want to leave. But it is a hard town. She sets her mouth in firm resolve. It is a hard town. She does not want to leave. But she must.
On the last day, she eases herself down the slippery steps backwards holding a cane in one hand and the railing in the other. She says “Goodbye” to every little fern and Baby’s Tears she has planted . She even allows a banana slug to live munching on her last Begonia instead of impaling him on a nail that was her usual response to seeing one of the voracious eaters.
“I will miss the redwood snails, but not those ugly yellow slugs,” she thinks. This makes her smile, but she knows more tears will follow…. Some day banana slugs will be a sacred object in her memories….
(First published May 30, 2013)
