Sunday, October 22, 2006

Steps



Before I enter my home & before I go to bed. When I first wake up and when I leave my house. When I was in college & lived in an apartment. At the High Museum, Field museum & at the beach. At national parks & national monuments. At the doctors office & the hospital. In cemetaries & at the church. On houses and sheds. Inside & out. Old & new. In the yard & in the den. Metal and stone. Concrete &wood. For form & for function. Leading up & leading down. Leading in & leading out.
In my life, in my head, in my world and probably yours too. Steps. Countless steps.

In the wee hours of the night, when all else are seemingly asleep, I'll silently slip outside. I sit on my front steps. In the spring I hear a beautiful middle of the night songbird...maybe a nightengale. In the summer, I can hear the owl from one of the oak trees overhead & i can sneak a peek at a neighborhood kid sneaking out. Almost always, I can hear the bats in the old oak trees & a train off in the near distance. I watch the cats slink up to steal a sip of water from my pond, totally unaware of my presence. Ocassionally, I may see a shooting star... which always makes me feel a little blessed to have even caught a glimpse of it.
Outside in the wee hours of the night, I sit on the front steps & contemplate life...big things & little things... time...people...places...sounds... smells...silence & how loud it can be. Feeling antsy, I scoot down one more step. I hear another human being from the distance & I scoot back up. In the dark of the night & early morning, just sitting on the steps... taking it all in.


11 comments:

vicci said...

I can just see you...sittin in the still of a dark night on those steps....watching...listening....I like steps!!! Especially old stone steps.....that lead to nowhere! I grew up in 2 story houses...they don't have too many 2-stories out here in California...I miss them!

Anonymous said...

Persichetti says..
We lived in a 2-story house also and my sister and I used to sit at the top step and just listen to my mom and dad talk, laugh and fight. Oh the many times we got caught! And how about sliding down steps on your butt...we used to do that til it hurt!

mist1 said...

I count steps. I know how many steps in my childhood home. I know how many steps in Mom's house. I know how many I have. All the important places that I go, I know how many steps are there.

No, I'm not medicated. Yes, I probably should be.

M@ said...

Mist1 sounds a bit "off." As a boy, I had OCD and was sort of like that.

anyway, i like the steps. Dude, you have a motiff! For me, it's all about the penguins.

Anne said...

Beautiful words and pictures. I love the sound of trains at night. Very comforting. When i was little and couldn't sleep, and everyone else was asleep, i felt like the only person in the world. Then i would hear a train in the distance and know there were people even in the middle of the night working to be sure everyone was taken care of. I like steps too, just not real big ones. I fell down some when i was 9 and they've made me a bit nervous since.

slaghammer said...

Compared to daytime critters, their nighttime cousins seem to operate on a different level of interaction, or acceptance, or whatever that feeling is, between them and us. Maybe it’s because we humans are so obviously out of our element in the dark and we are less threatening as result.

Me said...

I used to enjoy slipping out of the house in the middle of the night and sit on the back.front steps and smoke a pipe or a cigarette. Just me, steps and night.

skinnylittleblonde said...

Vicci~ LOL, the bottom pic is of some old steps around the corner from my house that lead to no-where. I'm sure they once led to somewhere magical.

Persichetti~ ILYSVM. I have a picture painted in my head of you as a little girl perched upon those steps & I'm reminded of a story of snotty little kids passing by ...'what's up cookie?' Also, my brother & I would pile ourselves into a box & send ourselves flying down the steps...sometimes rolling more than sliding...

LOL Mist1~ there is a name for that, not that it matters. That's an art, not an illness & requires no medication ... according to doctor skinnylittleblonde:)

Matt~Does one outgrow OCD's? Mine just change in magnitiude. lol.

Anne~ I, too, fell down a flight when I was about 9, but it was all my fault. The train comes by about every 20 minutes & I absolutley love it. You're right...it is a reminder that I'm not alone & the sound is much preferred over airplanes (which I rarely hear & when I do, I am suspicious) anyday.

Slag~ I think you are on to something. My presence seems to never faze the nighttime critters. Camping a few weeks ago in an area populated more so than I am accustomed to, I awoke in the wee hours because I heard a sound. I was terrified...Afraid of bears? deer? possums? any other wild animals? Nope, with all of them I can either sit motionless & enjoy the view. I was afraid it may be people!

Orhan~That is so me...sometime, somewhere in this blog world I said silence, to me, is peace & I guess I was talking about how loud silence can be, really. The night sounds. The all alone sounds.

Anne said...

Skinny and Slaghammer - i think you're right. Night creatures are different, almost magical. I don't get suspicious of airplanes, just the occasional circling police helicopter. *sigh* it's not as country as it used to be out here.
Sorry you can't see my slideshow. You're right, some slideshows require special software. I'll see if i can do anything about that.

M@ said...

Funny. Yes, OCD is far more common in boys than girls. And most boys tend to outgrow theres. Sure, I still feel a compulsion to do something funny once in a while when I get excited but for the most part it's gone.

I seem to have replaced it with alcoholism, which I'm pretty sure I didn't have as a boy. :)

skinnylittleblonde said...

Anne~ LOL, yes, even the helicopters are more common than the airplanes. We even had one land about a block away last month. I guess because they are more common here (uh-oh), I am less skeptical of them than the planes.
Matt~ As a boy, did you love to spin in circles? I did & I remember one of my sisters' boyfriends saying that was a sign that I would grow up to be a drinker or a smoker.