A Good Stretch of the Legs
When I was four or five years old, my family moved to a small former farm outside of Akron, Ohio. A good three to five acres of the lawn were mown on a regular basis, and we enjoyed things like a softball game that used a walnut tree as first base, rides in a go-kart my cousins had, or just swinging from my rope swing or swing set.
But from the time we got there, my favorite thing to do was wander the grounds. From treks through the adjacent woods with my grandmother searching for blackberries, or circling the big house looking for “potion ingredients” that would be mashed into a big muddy mess in whatever metal tub was laying around, I was usually found outdoors any time the weather was warm. I made laps around the wood pile that used to be the cow barn and met the resident ground hog who terrified my preschool self by standing up on his hind legs to get a better look at me.
My sister was a baby at the time, so most of these wanderings were solo trips, and I have always enjoyed a good lonely walk to clear my head when life starts creeping in on me.
When we moved to a suburban neighborhood just after kindergarten, my sister and my mom joined me on walks around our block. Pushing a stroller or pulling a wagon is so much easier when there are sidewalks. My mom walked a lot at this time, for fitness and to socialize with our neighbors. On our first walk around the block, my sister wanted to see the pretty flowers at one house, and we met a family who had kids the exact same age and we became fast friends.
We walked everywhere in that neighborhood. We walked to school every day, we walked to our friends houses, and in summer evenings you could find us trailing behind our walking moms, just far enough behind so that they could talk about parenting us without worrying that we were eavesdropping.
As a teenager my cousins and I walked to escape the grown ups and little kids at family gatherings. We scuttled over the streets of Parma, relaying all of our angst and trying to guess what family dramas were playing out in our absence.
When I got to college, I was walking everywhere and loving it. I remember walking back to the dorm on a cool blue autumn day, looking up at the cloudless sky, and feeling a profound sense of contentedness and hope for the future. During the summer and on winter breaks, I missed the activity of campus, and looked for friends to join me on expeditions around the local branch of the metro parks. An older woman who had worked with me in the Children’s Department of Sears during my high school years was now walking to stave off osteoporosis, and we would spend hours on the shaded asphalt trails discovering that a forty year age gap was no hindrance to deep friendship.
Around this time I was also discovering Jane Austen and the regency rambles of her heroines. Here were girls after my own heart! They walked everywhere. For fun, to get somewhere, to think, for fun. Elizabeth Bennet tromped through the mud to get to her sister when she was sick, and Anne Elliot gained her bloom back walking the shores of Lyme.
My love of walking was first tested after my oldest son was born. The end of the pregnancy marked the beginning of a particularly bad Crohn’s flare, and my arch nemesis, prednisone, was prescribed to halt the inflammation of my small intestine. Many people enjoy a surge of energy and productiveness on steroids, but my body processes the drug in a different way.
I remember the day I tried to take my three month old son for a short walk to the corner drug store on an unseasonably warm March day. I bundled him into his stroller, tied my sneakers, and we were off.
I made it five driveways.
How to explain the excruciating pain coursing through my shins? It was as if my bones themselves were tightening in protest at the slightest movement. I sat down hard on the pavement, trying to decide if I would push through the pain or turn around for home. Being stubborn is something I’ve always been proud of, but that streak can sometimes make me do very foolish things. I pressed on, got five more driveways, collapsed again, and decided that prednisone and Crohn’s disease would not defeat me. Today, if I were in the same situation, I wouldn’t risk pushing an infant while pushing my own limits. How brazen was I to charge on without a clue as to what would happen if my legs gave out completely and I was stranded until someone came along to help me home? I had a cell phone, but friends and family were at least twenty minutes away, and who knew if they would even answer on a weekday morning?
Over the years, I’ve learned just how far I can push a body wracked by heavy doses of life-saving medications and damaged tissues. When my intestines burst in 2010, the doctors wanted me up and moving quickly after surgery. I discovered that I could bargain with the nurses — if I took three turns around the ward with my IV pole, I could avoid the painful heparin shot that was preventing blood clots.
As long as I could walk, I would heal. I would survive the worst my body could throw at me.
Over the past three years, as I experienced the rejection of one immunosuppresant drug that threw me into a Crohn’s flare, followed by a fibromyalgia flare compounded by hip and back pain that wouldn’t respond to pain medication, to the final crushing blows of exhaustion and decreased brain function, it was the loss of walking that crushed me the most.
It really hit home the day I walked home from lunch with coworkers near the library and my legs buckled on the way to my office. I began to have frequent bouts of what I call “the shakes,” a loss of muscle control that causes staggering and jerky limb movements. Walking during these episodes is like being a marionette with no control of your strings, joints at odd angles and an uneven gait.
Then came the time when the effort of putting one foot in front of the other was more energy than my body could spare. I spent days, weeks, months, laying on a couch or in bed, pain coursing through my clenched, unused muscles but without the strength to rise up and pull myself out of it.
It was a good three weeks after I stopped working from home that my body finally decided to let me walk for exercise again instead of just the baby steps from couch to kitchen to bed to bathroom around my house. I started too fast, though, and crashed after a week or so of daily one mile walks. Three days of sleeping and bed rest taught me to lower my expectations.
Living with my aunt, no longer packing house for moving every day, I have the energy to walk. Today I enjoyed the sun and spring during a two mile loop back in the same Parma neighborhood my cousins and I once paced. My shins ache. My ankles are blistered. I stumbled several times on the sidewalk during the last quarter mile. But I can walk. And until my legs give out beneath me, I will continue to walk.
Wherever I wander I am home.
