38. Solid Ground

I feel the earth. Move. Under my feet.

Hi! If you want this piece read to you (by me, not a computer) click on the audio above☝🏼

I barely notice it anymore, the thousands of steps our son racks up every day, the miles he walks in our living room.

In our home, it’s like this.

It’s not anything like the disembodied pitter-patter of our toddler’s feet coming down the hallway to interrupt our late-night TV, which was sweet (but also creepy in an evil Chucky doll kind of way).

Today, his footfalls are very much embodied, man-sized strides crossing the room again and again, bare feet slapping, beads spinning, and singing or scripting or beatboxing, too. It’s how he soothes his anxiety, entertains himself, satisfies his restless limbs.

We’re mostly immune to it—unless his route is taking him back and forth through a conversation we’re trying to have. 

But it’s not like this, exactly, when we’re away from home. It’s like this, amplified.

When we are out of town—in a hotel on an upper floor, in a cabin with a crawl space below, or in any room that lacks a concrete foundation—his heavy steps on hollow floors reverberate like a semi-truck passing over a bridge. He’s a whole convoy, relentlessly rolling on.

When we can, we opt for a first-floor room to avoid complaints from downstairs neighbors and to save ourselves from the constant vibration, because, of course, his impulse to move only increases in unfamiliar places.

It’s not anything like those rough days of his adolescence when plywood subfloors cracked beneath his slamming feet, but still his perpetual pacing shakes the walls like a seismic wave.

Even his happy stomping rattles the picture frames.

We can go for walks to answer his call to move. We can retreat to the patio, a safe distance from his epicenter, where it feels less like trying to “relax” while sitting in the middle of a busy bouncy castle.

Oh, please, hon, we’re on vacation. Just for a minute. Sit down, sit down, sit down.

It’s very possible he’s attracted to the sensation of a springier floor under his feet.

Maybe for him, it’s like when we held him in our arms, pacing across the second floor of our first home, dancing and rocking and bouncing our baby boy endlessly until he fell asleep.

Surely, this movement consoles him, even if its repetitive percussion does not feel serene to me.

So, there’s nothing like returning home, to the house we built on its sturdy concrete slab. He will still tread the floors, as he does, but we’ll be released from the extreme tremors.

Back on solid ground.

Passing along the earworm I picked up while writing this piece…

Also this remix by Andy Buchan on Soundcloud :)

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