Those Old Steps

Marcia said that Greg Bates uncovered the steps that used to lead downward from the tongue-and-grove cabin to the beach. He was working on his own hill when he found them. It was easy for me to bring back memories of those old times when thinking about those steps. They were the ones that Sean Bates rebuilt every year.

... the darkness of climbing the stairs on the path in the woods ...

I walked so many little children up to the cabin using that stair short-cut. The pitch of the path was steep but it was the uneven rise of the stairs that caused the most trouble. My other children would be running ahead, but the smallest one always had short legs couldn't make the height from one step to another. I would help them, though now I only have memories of me holding onto one of their hands, their bodies dang to the steep side, as though they would tumble down that hill, but battling to get both feet under them again.

Half-way up that path bees had built a hive. When we would walk children by that spot there was often a bee or two in the air that someone would try to swat away. I would be saying, just live peaceably with the bees, but their little hearts were beating and their hands were wildly waving the bees off.

One day, when Bonnie McLoone was walking her daughter, Amanda, back up to the house, Amanda so young that she could hardly talk, she spoke in a tiny voice, "There's the damn bee patch!" 

That is one of the times when Bonnie was alerted that Amanda was picking up more vocabulary than she had intended her to have.

Those are also the same steps Doral Pilling came up just about the last time he had been fishing. It was growing dark. His bones were aching. He didn't know why. “The insides of my bones were aching,” he would say. “I have to live with that. How can doctors fix an ache on the inside of your bones.”

When Doral got to the stairs that last time, he was so tired he couldn't climb them, so he came up them on his hands and knees. So dark he couldn't see in the trees, so he made his asset by braille.  Fish in hand, of course.

Thank you, Sean. Your yearly step repair helps me hold a lot of memories. Long after my children could walk the steps on their own, I would pass that place half way up to the cabin and look for the bees. I would even tell others as we climbed past that spot, “Look, that is where the damn bee patch used to be,” and I would look down and point to the left as though the bees were still present.

I am glad Greg uncovered the stairs again. I don't want to bury those memories.

Arta