February 16, 2025

By Arthur H. Gunther III

thecolumnrule.com

In this 1936 house where I now live, in old Upper Nyack, N.Y., there are footsteps left behind. Not so where I was previously, almost 51 years in nearby Blauvelt. That was a newly built place, and my family of four made the first markings from the earliest of souls-on.

You have to be respectful when you move to what was someone else’s house, because it was not just that but also a home. Probably children conceived, perhaps some souls passed, the Great Depression endured, then a war when a son or father or both maybe took footsteps off the porch that faces the Hudson River, to get on a boat in Piermont then a ship over the Atlantic to a fighting theatre on the world’s biggest stage.

So many footsteps, some perhaps never to be felt again on the old-growth wooden floors; to step on what was once a metal floor grate for the furnace so as to get dressed for the school just across North Broadway.

Steps on holidays; mom and grandma cooking in the kitchen; children tumbling down the stairs to open presents; the young daughter in prom dress, fancy new shoes, soon enough to leave to build her own life, to make new footsteps somewhere else.

As I come in the side door of this small American Four Square-style home, fresh from shoveling snow on land that is the ninth place in my now fifth-generation Rockland County where I have done so, I place my wet boots on the stairway, one to the side on each plank. How many did that before me?

We are leaving steps here; others to follow.

The writer is a retired newspaperman.

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