I was unaware of my own limbs. Arms and legs. No flailing, trying to save myself. My body was silent, no voice. No will. No sensation of time. Nothingness. Except for the change of scenery. My eyes aware of the earth and the sky as my body rolled effortlessly. There was no past, no future, not even the present. All sensations seemed to have left me. Reality belonged to the only onlooker, my husband, surely in shock. I was careening downward to almost certain death.
Later I would wonder if that was the way it would be…if I had continued downward. Had my soul already left my body? Or had it wrapped around me, protecting me in those harsh final moments that waited in the darkness below? But that was after, when I returned to my body and my feet once again stood on the ground.
I stopped rolling, and slid on my belly, not cognizant of how or why. My arms wrapped around a small tree, about five inches in diameter. My abdomen was not aware that it hit the tree first, that the tree had stopped my silent passage to the darkness below. I was not aware that after my body hit the tree, I slid around it on my belly so that my legs now pointed downward and I looked up to see my husband leaning forward, offering his walking stick, which was the first thing to frighten me. His stick was too far away, impossible for me to reach, without him risking treacherous steps forward.
I shook my head.
“No!”
I think I said aloud, “I need some time.”
A nightmarish image flashed in my thoughts of me grabbing the stick he held out for me, that would surely pull him down, and beyond, and gone.
Rational…that’s all I could afford to be at that moment. I stared at the small trunk of the tree that I clung to, my life raft on the slope, and hoped it was deeply rooted. My eyes and brain were making connections. I scanned the area around and above me, assessing the possibility of my climbing to safety. I needed to be up there, on flat ground, where I had been before something had caused me to lose my footing…when I thought I had been walking carefully, before I was clinging to this tiny tree.
I looked for live roots that my hands and toes could grab and pull and push.
“Your stick is there if you want to use it.”
I followed my husband’s stretched out hand and considered the walking stick I had brought from home. A remnant from a tree we had removed the year before from our yard, the year of Covid-19. That’s what brought us here, a short get-a-way from the interminable quarantine of the waning pandemic. A short reprieve from the home we loved that had in the past year been both our sanctuary and our prison.
The toes of my shoes had found a foothold. I slowly loosened my grip and allowed my right hand to pull the stick to me, though I knew it would not help me climb to safety. It was still rough. My plan had been to sand and stain both of our walking sticks, but at that moment I appreciated the roughness that perhaps had kept it close by. I thrust it upward, toward the love of my life. It was a silent promise that I would soon follow. (excerpt)
