What I'm Learning from a Staircase

The night before last night, I sat with my dad out on our back deck. It’s an old deck, but it has many memories, and often when things are hard, it’s where we find ourselves. This past weekend my dad and my brother built a shade cover type thing and attached Edison lights to it. It looks beautiful, its all-golden light, with none of the smoke of the previous lights which were tiki torches. The house rests behind the deck, and while we sat at the cast iron table, him with a beer, me without, we talked about a past I don’t remember. It’s the story of our house, my grandma Marie, and her husband Bill bought this house in the early days of their marriage. They had a ship’s toilet in the basement, and the master bedroom was down a long hall and to the right. I can almost imagine what it looked like back then.

He told me how his grandfather had lived with them after his wife passed, and I never knew that. I didn’t know that he always wore grey either, or that he built the back steps up to our back deck, that I now love so much. I had no idea that much of what I know as just always being there, had actually been created only a few short years ago. Our yard has three main points. There is the part that comes off of the back deck which is smaller, it has the fish pond and the firepit but it’s not nearly as nice as the space to the left, which is lush and green, it is mostly flat, its sunny most of the day. Then up from that is the hill, which is messy, it has trees and ivy going up the back fence.

Through the years we’ve added and adjusted, a rope swing here, a smoker there, a ping pong table, we tore out the very pool our parents before us put in. Now it looks as though there was never a pool at all. Some things, which we think will last forever, do. But rarely do those things last the way we expect them too. I’m sure when my great grandfather put in those steps, he intended them to last. I’m also sure he never thought that one day his grandson would buy the house from his daughter, and that from there I would then grow up to play on them.

I wonder through this time, how many things will I build that will long outlast even my memory. How many will continue on past me, past my generation? I’m only twenty- two. I don’t have answers to that question. But someday I will. Someday you will. It’s easy when your young, to get into survival mode. Just make it to the next day, and the next and the next. But hearing that story, I wonder if that doesn’t make up our lives. All he thought was that he needed a staircase, so he built one, and it’s long out lasted him. It has given me a connection to a man I have never known. I’ve never even seen a picture.

It’s hard to be introspective. You have no idea what choices are the ones that will matter, and which ones are the ones that are just a part of daily life. How much can you give to your future, without taking the present away? I don’t have the answer to that either.

I don’t have a conclusion to this. These are questions I can’t answer, and truthfully, you probably can’t either. But I hope they make you think, and I hope they continue to make me think, because recently, especially during Covid, I’ve been wondering, if I’m in some sort of time loop. Or at least, that’s what it feels like. It feels like nothing matters because nothing's happening. And yet, somewhere in my head I realize that yes, it is. The sun is still rising. Every day I do still get older. Society is stopping, but the world is going. Every day feels like an uphill battle on whether to build a staircase, or just say I can do it when the world starts again. Every day is a challenge to fight the notion that I have all the time in the world. It’s occurring to me, with every second more and more that that couldn’t be further from the truth.