On Growing Old

Our old basset hound, Dudley. Rest in peace big boy!!!

Jury Rigged

by Carol Potter

It’s a farm fact. How we grew up.

Funky equipment failing and

my father doing whatever

he had to do to put it back together

again. Hammer. Tape. Wire. Give it

a good slam. No time to mess

around, newly baled field

and a rainstorm coming.

You make it go. Which is why

it was no surprise

this past weekend to see

this get up my parents have rigged

to help my father get up

the stairs so they can go on

sleeping in the marital bed.

Mother is steadying my father up the stairs by a rope

hooked to his belt

one step at a time. You can hear him

say pull, then the creak of his weight

as he reaches the next step, then the silence

as he pauses, then pull, he calls out

and she does. My sister and I visiting

for the weekend stand in our old

bedroom. We don’t go out in the hallway

because it seems like something

we ought not to watch, or even

listen to any more than you’d listen in

on someone in the next room making love,

both of them with their failing hearts

but his barely working now.

Books piled at strategic steps to make

half steps. My mother

and father tethered on the steep

risers him balancing

on the step, her with the rope

taut in her hand. Are we supposed

to stop them, come parent like

around the corner and demand

they put the rope down, go sleep

in the pull out couch

in the living room, go check

into a motel, a nursing home

wherever you get to go, but trained

to do as he says, we stay

back. We try not to listen

to the sounds they make

on the crooked stairs

we children fell down one by

one, the corner with the brick

abutment and the metal

radiator at the bottom of it all.

-Carol Potter