Andante's Railing ...Not "in Texas"

A short while ago Andante of Collective Sigh ran a post and a picture telling of how she, in her still weakened state due to cancer and her continuing treatment for it, and alone at the time, fell while negotiatiing the flight of several steps from her garage into her house, and it took her half an hour to get to her recliner and from there to take new stock of things.  Soon afterward the husband of one of her best friends hustled over with tools and some lumber, and a couple of hours later she had a brand new set of shorter steps, plus a railing and some highly buoyed feelings.

One of her commenters said something  that struck a nerve.  He spoke of how people never think about how necessary it is that their houses be outfitted with things, removable or not,  like ramps and railings, for those times when illness or aging otherwise turns a house into a real and even a life-threatening obstacle course.

Actually some people do think of that, and heavily -- the ones who have in some way actually taken some role in building their houses, and that includes plenty of people around here ...and me.   Yet, I guess I can be seen as being even guiltier than those to whom the thought rarely occurs, because I think of such measures nearly every day, yet so far I have done little more than that,  and now 80 is only just over two  years away.

I know I talk about building this house a lot, but I have to mention here how part of the trouble is the way that I had in mind the principle of being as light on the land as possible, plus I had no desire to have a basement.  So, as the best building site I could find was a gentle, south facing slope, I put my house up on short posts and in three levels to accommodate the slope without disturbing it.

This means that to enter the house,  you have to climb short sets of steps to get on any of the three decks,  the shortest set being only one step high, though that leads to the entrance that we use the least. Then  to get from one level to the other inside the house involves climbing flights of three more steps each, while reaching the main bedroom, the only room on the second floor, calls for climbing a spiral staircase of 12 steps.   Finally, to use the bathroom requires taking two steps up, because I platformed that above the main floor, the idea being to keep the plumbing, especially the traps, inside the heated part of the house.

So I am well aware of the difficulties that might come and the likelihoods, but I have in my mind complete pictures of what I will have to do when the time comes, and I am hoping that that is half the battle.

Aside from possibly not being in a condition to take those measures when the moment comes, my biggest drawback will be a tendency always to think of doing things  on my own.

  Andante and her commenters spoke of how great it was to have friends to help with things, and to be a friend and help with things in turn, and that is all totally true, and it's just the way my wife thinks.

What, then, causes me to always think instead only in terms of doing things entirely on my own?.

Well, I know exactly why, and meanwhile I guess I just like to have that being the way for things to go with me.   Maybe I take one of the major reasons for living in the country in the first place, being as self-sufficient as possible, too seriously.

That might account for why the opening of "Blood Simple,"  the early film masterpiece of the Coen brothers, is one of my very favorite movie beginnings.  It has that remarkable character actor, the late J.T. Walsh, giving that great, short "Nothing comes with a gan'tee"monolog that he finishes by saying, roughly, "In Russia people stick together and help out each other.  That's the theory anyway.  But what I know about is Texas, and in Texas you're on your own."

I just love that, and one reason is that  I feel that I've always been so "out of it," by the standards of others, that I've always been "in Texas," figuratively speaking.

Odd side note: Years ago I gave S., my neighbor up the road, a short though wide set of oak steps that I had made and had been using outside somewhere.  I thought they were too gray and weathered even at that time to be used inside her laundry room that she was remodeling, and that led up into her kitchen in exactly the same way that Andante's does from her garage.  But S. liked them, and they may still be in use today.