Shear Wall

We have a wrought iron hand rail that winds along the wall of our staircase. It would seem the perfect thing to hold onto when sailing down the stairs.

For some reason, however, it always feels more natural to run our fingers along the opposite wall, the one without the handrail as we go down, grazing it with our fingertips like a windsurfer skimming the surface of the water, or a cyclist taking a tight curve, skirring the gravel.

Countless times a day we go up and down the stairs running our fingers along the same lines, just below each respective family-member's left shoulder. The lines were invisible, until recently. After so much time, the fingerprints have accumulated and, though barely visible, there are streaks, five streaks along the wall. It is time to spray them with some eco-friendly scrub and swab them away. Easy enough. Yet I haven't done it. I admit it's strange, but I like them. They remind me of the marks in the door-frame growing up which measured my hieght throughout childhood. They remind me of rushing down the stairs for the umpteenth time that night to get a bottle of warm milk for a baby. They remind me of running downstairs to make sure the doors are locked, to turn off the lights, to check on a sound, to get a glass of water. They look so hurried, like the quick strokes that indicate a comic book superhero is moving really fast.

I like them because I imagine that, given enough time, all those softly padded fingers of my children and my husband will eventually create permanent grooves in the wall, grooves that the next owners of this house will use to display thimbles, acorns and Matchbox cars, grooves that cannot be erased with a quick swipe of Quilted Northern. I like them because they pay secret homage to the wall that holds me up when I'm scrambling in slippery socks, half-asleep, to find children's Tylenol for one or two or three fevers, and I want only to collapse. 

Then they aren't fingerprints and handprints and streaks, but the glistening brow of a hard-working shear wall, tethering the dream-stuffed mattresses of dozing children, as well as their distracted mother, to the bedrock below.