Rickety Stairs

I was thinking today of these rickety iron stairs I used to climb as a child. There were actually three sets of these stairs in town. One was on the far east side of town, one in the middle, and one on the west side of town. I don't know what purpose these stairs actually served, because there was no sidewalk leading to or from them. They were just iron stairs cemented into the hillside.

They were cemented into the ground at intervals, but that didn't stop them from having a very wide range of movement. Walking on those steps was an adventure. They creaked and moaned, and swayed from side to side and up and down as you moved on them. You were convinced every time that they would collapse.

The ones on the west side of town were relatively close to my grandma's house. But we were forbidden to go on those steps. (Because they were dangerous, see?) My cousin, who was not forbidden, would climb up and down those stairs to taunt me and my brother.

I did climb the ones on the east side of town, many times. As I've mentioned before, there were vast stretches of unsupervised time in my childhood--or time in which I was the supervisor of my little brother. So, from about age 10, we would walk to town on the railroad tracks, over the trestle (over the river), and end up in this shitty little dump area (which is now a historical park, with recreated log cabins and such). That place was pretty close to the iron steps, so it was pretty much given that my little brother and I would play on those steps.

Later, in high school, my friend's boyfriend lived at the bottom of those steps and when I went to her house, we would sometimes go down those steps to go hang out with him. We would sit on those steps and smoke cigarettes and talk about the kind of crap high school kids talked about back then.

I don't think I've ever traversed the steps in the middle of the town. There was a boy that I liked all through jr. high and high school who lived right there, so of course, I never went near those steps.

I dream frequently about those steps... being on them as they sway and groan and threaten to collapse. The weird thing is that those are not necessarily bad dreams. Sometimes I even feel like I'm having fun.

I asked my brother about the steps a while back. You know, did he remember playing on them? Do the kids still use them? Stuff like that. Sadly, he told me they had been torn down years ago.

So now they exist only in memory.