Ladders

 

Today while reading Anne Lamott, I was reminded of the ladder I used to fear. It was a wooden one my dad would set up to get into the attic in our house in Cleveland. The bottom half of the ladder were regular flat steps. But the top half were round rungs. Stepping on them terrified me. I know eventually I braved the scary steps and visited the attic, but I think it took a number of years.

When we moved to the suburbs, everything in the attic went into a basement. My encounter with ladders after that was minimal.

At school I have a 3 step ladder is use on occasion. As I’ve gotten older, I usually wait until a neighboring teacher is nearby. I let her know I’m going to be on my ladder, just in case. 

Aging makes you see everything differently.

In our condo, we have very high ceilings. Once a year, Jim would extend our ladder so he could replace batteries in the smoke detectors. He no longer can do that, so we hired someone to handle it this year. I wasn’t about to do it!

Last time I spent a good deal of time on ladders was after Hurricane Ian. I got up there and cleaned all the ceiling fans. I’ve been thinking it probably wouldn’t be a bad idea to do that again. But we’ll see. I will have to really be in the mood for the acrobatics involved. 

I’m not in any hurry.