Hands on the Rail

On Garden Lane, there is a house numbered 212 with stain glass windows, wooden siding, and a little white porch.  It isn’t much really.  The windows are cracked and the porch swing is broken, barely hanging on by the rusty chain on the right side, still trying to hold on to a life long gone.  It barely has two stories, since the second one is half the height it should`.  When you come in the front door the only staircase is on the left, winding up along the wall to that little, insignificant room.  None of it is much of anything, really.

But along the right side of that little staircase is a handrail.

That might sound insignificant, but handrails are a vastly underestimated species.  This particular rail was crafted of the finest cedar, well-polished and practically glimmering in its day.  Of course, its day has long passed.  While it still stands strongly, unlike much of the abandoned house, the polish is long worn down and the once red cedar has faded to a dull brown, scratched and chipped in uncountable places.  That alone would make it worthless to the passing eye, not to mention the stain of innumerable dirty hands.  But if anyone would stop to look at something so insignificant as a worn down handrail, they might begin to sense the underestimated value.  In such craftsmanship, wears and tears are an occupational hazard every rail must accept.  If the wood is stout and strong enough to bear them, such marks can become scars of war and age—badges of honor for all that might see them.  No one viewer could understand the full story written in those marks, but the handrail itself can remember them as long as it stands, keeping each wound safely tucked in its memory as a blow taken and endured.  Some are memories easy to keep and desirable to remember, like the chip on the corner at the bottom where little Charlie bumped his head the first time he tried to climb the staircase on his own.  Others are a little harder and infinitely more painful, like the crack at the top where Mr. Thompson slammed his fist to vent the anger that almost struck his wife in their last argument, before they left little 212 Garden Lane in different directions, or the scratches right in the middle where old Miss Susan tried so hard to hang on before she fell and broke her hip in the injury that ended up taking her away to a bigger house with more caretakers but less of the love that comes from one’s own home.  Some are light splinters, and some are deep gouges that sting and ache after years for healing.  But both are equally remembered and documented without bias in that little, seemingly insignificant frame.

Hands that raced down excitedly and hands that trudged up disappointedly left the same handprints, but the rail knows the differences now just as it felt the difference all those years ago when they occurred.  Fingers that grasped shakily and fingers that traced nostalgically were equally supported.  Nails that tapped impatiently and nails that scratched angrily were accepted on the same terms, all needing the same surface on which to express feelings that were acknowledge nowhere else.  All hands relied on the rail, and to all hands the rail offered all it had to give.  Sometimes that support was not enough, but it never ceased to offer, just the same.  Even the rail knows that it is not the wood that matters, even in its day of glory and polish.  Rather, it is the scars and stains that matter, and the human hearts that went into them.  That is why the handrail is so important, and so often overlooked: because it is the flaws that make the character and the value, not the structure.  That is why so many pass by and never sense the importance, and why even that solid cedar frame will eventually be torn down with the rest of that ancient home and forgotten: because no one stops to think of the hands on the rail.