Heavy Load

This weekend I was reminded how too much of something can be bad for you. Like most people who live around here, we have a water softener, and like most people, I have to put salt in the brine tank.

The salt comes conveniently packaged in 40-pound bags with a handle on each end. I suppose some people carry the bags like a basket, grasping the handle on each end, and I suppose some people, such as myself, will employ what my mother used to call “a lazy man’s load.”

A lazy man’s load, according to my mother, meant you would overload your arms with cargo to save a trip. For instance, if I have to carry ten bags of salt from my truck, through the garage, up the stairs to the house, down the hall, around the corner and down the stairs to the basement, my mother would call me lazy if I carried a bag in each hand and made five trips instead of ten.  Then again, she never carried 40-pound bags of salt.

Perhaps, I am lazy, in that I am trying to cut my trips in half, or maybe I am stubborn and just trying to prove I can still carry a bag in each hand. I am completely aware that I won’t win any county fair strong man competitions with such a feat, but by the end of the fifth trip my arms have each gained an inch in length.

Forty pounds is heavier than it used to be. When Bill Stemmer was running the feed mill in town, I used to buy chicken feed from him. Bill’s a big man and thought nothing of throwing 100-pound bags of feed around.  I, on the other hand, gave the matter a good deal of consideration. This was before I entered the wonderful world of pick-up trucks with their open cargo area and tall end-gate. Getting a heavy bag of feed into the trunk of a car is one thing, persuading it out is a different task entirely.

That’s the way it is with the salt bags. The journey through the house is easy; it’s the basement stairs that tests your mettle. The first step is the widest of the lot, allowing for a confident purchase, the second step is the doozie and warrants a warning. It’s narrow and it almost disappears from sight, as you descend into the bowels of the house.

For years I have contemplated replacing the whole staircase, using the top step as the model for the rest its brothers. The second step usually doesn’t bother me too much, but the opening for the stairs is too narrow to descend it straight away, and carrying bags sideways down the steps means the upper one has to be raised or allowed to bump down the stairs. Plus there is the matter of tripping and killing myself, but at least I would be well preserved with all that salt.

I was explaining the problem of the second step to my smart son-in-law and he asked to see it. After a quick inspection, he pointed out that the large first step was overshadowing the second step. He advised reducing the width of the first step by two inches, thereby exposing more of the second step.

I could feel my blood pressure go up with the realization that twenty years of tripping down the steps could have been eliminated so easily. The wide first step is the problem, as is too much salt.