The Thirty Feet to the Altar

Eight months

I would like to tell you that it went well. Mostly it went slow.

The first month I stood between the parallel bars with Mandy’s gait belt around my waist and her hand gripping the back of it. My legs shook so hard the bars rattled. Two minutes standing felt like a full day of walking beans.

Mandy fitted me with new ankle braces, carbon fiber, molded to my shins, that went inside my shoes and kept my feet from slapping down. She taught me to shift my weight to the right, swing the left leg from the hip, and catch it. Then shift left, swing right. Over and over.

“Your brain forgot how to do this,” she said. “Not your legs. We’re teaching your brain.”

At home I did the homework on the living room floor. Leg lifts with a rubber band. Bridges. Standing at the kitchen counter for as long as I could stand it, holding on, while Karen made supper around me.

Some nights I stood there and cried like a fool into the dish towel, and Karen never said a word about it. She’d just put her hand on my back and keep stirring.

In April we planted. Dale ran the planter and I ran the seed tender from the cab with the hand controls, and I still drove to Champaign every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Some days I fell asleep in the truck in the clinic parking lot before I went in.

By May I walked the length of the parallel bars without Mandy’s hand on the belt. By June I walked it with one hand on a bar and one on a cane. In July I took my first steps on two canes, with Mandy walking backward in front of me and the student walking behind with a wheelchair, just in case.

Three steps. Then I sat down hard in that chair and Mandy whooped so loud a man in the next room dropped a weight.

“Thirty feet is forty one steps for you,” she said. “I counted. We’re at three.”

“Then we’ve got thirty eight to go,” I said.