Ten days ago I was having a fairly productive day, having gotten up early (8:00 is early for this retiree) and marched through my to do list while Sarah, my house cleaner of many years, worked her magic.  Shortly after she left in the early afternoon, I was coming downstairs in my clogs carrying the laundry basket (Monday is laundry day, a tradition from my New Orleans red-beans-and-rice days), misjudged my progress to the main floor, and stepped out into thin air rather than onto the tile floor where I thought I was.  The laundry basket went flying and I made a hard landing on all fours.  Even now, recalling hitting that floor prompts both fear and horror at the thought of what I might have done.  I rolled onto my back, shocked into stasis for a few minutes before I began to test the damage.  The clogs had fallen off of course.  I could rotate both wrists without pain.  Good. Some pain resulted from rotating my left ankle, but not bad.  Also good.  But the right ankle was a different story, and the swelling had already begun.

How to get up?  Could I get up?  Flashes of the senior dilemma:  I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!  I crawled back to the stairs, and holding onto the balusters pulled myself up to sit on the penultimate step—my inadvertent launching pad moments earlier.  I’d badly sprained my right ankle back in 2002 attempting to ice skate on our beaver pond (hubris on the part of a native Floridian), and the pain there now did not seem as acute as the pain then.  So, calculating how best to deploy the RICE protocol—Rest, Ice, Compression, and Elevation—I ever so slowly proceeded to assemble ice packs and an Ace bandage and stayed off my feet as much as possible, finally deciding against calling for help.  After all, it wasn’t so bad to be forced to sit still and read, and I was already doing what could be done to treat a sprain.  Besides, driving to urgent care seemed unnecessary because coincidentally, in fewer than 48 hours I had an already- scheduled appointment with my orthopedist in Concord, a follow-up check on a knee problem now resolved.

That visit to Concord revealed more than a sprain; I had indeed fractured my right fibula, but not so badly that Dr. Burns thought surgery would be required. Phew. Since then, a second x-ray has confirmed that initial opinion, and I continue to manage, getting around in my Ankle Stabilizing Orthosis (ASO) brace, popping naproxen sodium twice daily.

Oh, so grateful I didn’t do much worse damage, I find the fall and the necessary accommodations of same since then have imposed a new perspective on this first month of my 70’s, the realization of how fast everything can change, how problematic the 38 stair steps that connect our three stories can be, and how limiting the progress of aging will likely become.  Must ALWAYS hold on when descending stairs!  Must stop wearing clogs!  Considering what lies ahead, and what a fall can mean, is top of mind.

But not the only thing.  The Fall, as recounted by John Milton, also comes to mind, and with it the memory of a moment early in the get-to-know me phase of falling in love with the man who would five years later become my husband.  We were both teaching at Regent’s College in London, sitting in a pub in Hampstead.  One of my courses was that formidable staple of the English major, Brit Lit Survey, Part 1, Beowulf through Paradise Lost.  I had just been teaching the latter, and was telling David how moving I found Adam’s immediate response on hearing Eve tell of her transgression:

How art thou lost, how on a sudden lost,

Defac’t, deflow’r’d, and now to Death devote?

Rather how hast thou yielded to transgress

The strict forbiddance, how to violate

The sacred Fruit forbidd’n!  some cursed fraud

Of Enemy hath beguild’d thee, yet unkown,

And mee with thee hath ruin’d, for with thee

Certain my resolution is to Die;

How can I live without thee, how forgo

Thy sweet Converse and Love so dearly join’d,

To live again in these wild Woods forlorn?  (PL, Book IX, 900-910)

“He cannot live without her.”  My heart broke a little as I said that, and David noticed; the tears that came to my eyes then fall freely now.

A fall, The Fall, falling in love.  Here on 2 November, All Souls, less than a week from the mid-term election, the fall I fear is the decline and fall of American democracy.  The great American experiment from the first depended on the honor of its leaders and an educated populace, however many were first excluded from that education and the opportunity to lead.  Now truth and election results are discounted by so many; the dearth of empathy and understanding is general.  I profited enormously from a good primary and secondary public school education; too many fellow citizens have not—like the furnace repair guy who arrived in September to do the necessary annual maintenance, so eager to convince me, a teacher, that because he himself had no children, he should not have to support public schools.  The Capitol is stormed and desecrated by citizens who seem to believe themselves patriots.  A man attacks another man, 82 years old, with a hammer because he’s married to the woman second in line to assume the presidency.  A mother takes a photo of her three children before sending them off to school each morning in case she has to identify them by what they were wearing on the last day of their lives.

This evening I will spend some time beside the Norway Spruce just east of our driveway, remembering the souls most dear to me whose ashes its roots has by now absorbed, wondering about the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns, and what the country I now inhabit will become before I join them.