Stairs

Now really, stairs are fascinating. When you are a baby in the crawling or beginning walking stage, you want to go up and down. Of course there is the brain damage part if you fall down them too often. Even at this early age usually the adults in the home get protective and teach you to slide down on your bottom or hold your hand until this becomes another skill in your growing arsenal. As boys, we used to see how many steps we could jump while coming down the stairs. Some houses lend themselves better to this important activity. Later we could holler: "I only took three, or I only took 5 jumps" The winner was the one with the fewest jumps. In Newark Valley on the farm there were two wide hand rails and you could make it to the bottom in "1". That was a real feat usually accompanied by: "Boys, quit jumping down the stairs."

Another thing of interest is what gets left on the stairs when you intend to take it up later. At Grandma Roe's house in Candor there frequently was a winding passage left to work your way upstairs and the items on the stairs could be there for sometime. She would not appreciate this observation from me. In Omaha we would get back from the store and put several items on the stairs with the unwritten rule that the next person going up would take them on up. This worked quite well for us and stuff never lasted very long on the stairs.

I have noticed that in houses with several floors and sets of stairs, the upper stairs are more narrow than the lower ones. This leeds me to believe that only skinny people ever went up these more narrow stairs.

In our barn we had a passage from the main floor to the lower basement area where we stored junk. These were not technically stairs but more like rungs in a ladder. I could pretend that this was a secret passage that no other person knew about and slip from one floor to the other. It came in handy when playing hide and seek.

Now winding stairs are fascinating. Cousin Georgia had this type of stairs in the foyer of her house but they were seldom used because there were back stairs off the kitchen which the family used regularly. There is a beautiful small church in Santa Fe that has a set of winding stairs so well made that there seems to be no visible support as they twist their way to the choir loft.

Older stairs show their age by their worn treads or steps and their creeks and groans as you traverse them. I was trying to quietly come up our stairs on the farm after an evening at my bachelor party and made it to the top landing only to run into a series of folding chairs which went down like dominoes and had my dad up and yelling in an instant. I was really sorry and snuck off to bed, very, very, sorry to have awakened dad. (There is more to this story - but later)

Now if you fall on the stairs at my age this can create a problem like a broken bone in a foot, so you do have to be careful when navigating stairs. I think I am coming full circle here as we help babies to go up or down the stairs and the old folks sometimes need help too. The climbing is good exercise though, so happy and safe travels on your stairs.