I'm a Klutz

Have I ever told you that I'm scared of stairs? 

Well, I am. 

I don't really know when it started.  I remember being a little kid and throwing all of the couch cushions into the stairwell, running from across the living room, and jumping into the pit of cushions that we (Josh, Miah, Ariel and I) had created, so I know that I haven't always been afraid of devilish stationary menaces.

I believe I fall down the stairs in a small way nearly once a month.  When I lived on Cedar Street in Spokane, it was that I would miss the top stair of a set of three that turned around a corner.  Three stairs is not so bad to slip down.  It's little more than a bump.

At the Bernard Street apartment, it was that the five stone steps on the outside of the building were constantly wet in the fall, winter, and spring.  That made for three seasons of nearly biting it face down as I tripped UP the stairs on my way home. 

In Forest Grove, the house had WOODEN steps that tended to be frozen early in the morning when I left for work.  I think I fell down those three or four times a month in October and November.

Then there was a house with no stairs... It was bliss.  Well, almost.  I slipped on the fake grass/utility carpet that covered the two stairs to the gym and hit my ass pretty good one time, but that might have been the result of a really hard training session and jelly legs.

Looking back on all of this, thankfully, most of my spills have be in private and relatively small-- just a step or three.

I do remember one truly epic fall down stairs in a public place.  It was my freshman year of college and it was winter term in Washington State.  Those of you who are from the PNW know that January and February can be treacherous, and walking from one building to the next on campus can be a bit of a mad dash over ice when the freezing rain starts to fall.

On one of my treks from the honors building to the English building I took a tumble down a flight of stairs.

This was no mortal tumble down a stair or two.  No.  I fell/slipped on the top step of a 14 step flight and bumped my way down the whole way, hitting my head a few times in the process.  If that were not enough, when I hit the bottom, I slid across the wet floor and spectacularly hit the double doors that were secured with a push bar.  I stood up and immediately threw up from the impact on my noggin. 

Did I mention this was between the 9am and the 10am class and there were about 100 people in the stairwell with me? No?  There were.

Did I mention I was wearing a skirt? No? Yep, it just kept getting better that day.

I guess that would be when my fear of steps started, because all of the other examples I can think of happened after that one, epic fail. 

Today, it happened again.  I've managed to avoid any major falls on the two flights of slick marble steps that must be scaled on a daily basis to get into our apartment and up to the bedroom here until today.  There have been one or two small falls UP the stairs to the bedroom, but nothing massive in the down direction.

Today, carrying an over full basket of laundry down to the washroom, I slipped and fell down the last five steps to the landing.  As my hands were holding the laundry basket, I didn't really get my hands out to the stair rail for help, but my left forearm did make it down as I fell.  I'm lucky I didn't snap my arm on the edge of the marble stair and now I have a hell of a bruise and goose egg on my arm.

Not very impressive in the photo, but I assure you, it is.

You can kind of see how the light is casting a bit of a glare on the high side.  If it starts to turn purple or green, I'll try and remember to show that off too.

The irony in this is that I was planning on using the "fear of stairs" story to teach my MUN club about structuring a story this week.  The story has a clear beginning, middle, and end, and makes for an entertaining telling.   I guess this time I tell it, I'll have a visual aid to prove my point.