When mortality has a rung of truth to it

The house is still there, in my home town, a few doors down from the top of a steep street. A universe.

I'll drive past with the kids every couple of years (they never tire of it) and point out where my old bedroom was. Its window used to be obscured by a choko vine running riot under a striped awning. The shady spot was once sanctuary for a pair of nesting silvereyes. I had a front-row seat to the whole agonising process and when the birds moved on, I hoped they'd never come back because I couldn't handle the stress.

The house is built over a garage through which you could enter a dank, dirt-floor, hole-in-the-wall void. One winter, while attempting to impress two Sydney sisters visiting relatives in our neigbourhood, I invited them into that creepy lair and promptly lit a welcoming campfire (indicating my 10-year-old understanding of women was around caveman level ... and, yes, precious little progress since).

Smelling the smoke, my father intervened before the entire place went up. Given the severity of the crime, he remained disconcertingly calm as he extinguished the jaunty blaze and suggested my visitors wander on home. As they left, he hissed in my ear the presence of those two girls had saved me from the flogging of a lifetime.

So, ladies, wherever you are, thanks.

Above that garage is a verandah, which, back then, was enclosed by a rotting timber balustrade anchored to the concrete by corroding metal posts; the only protection from a nasty drop onto more cement below.

Despite the patently inadequate railing, sometimes we'd throw a couple of foam mattresses on the exposed platform and dad would point out the constellations.

We slept out there the night Jon English was playing down at Olympic Park and drifted off as Old Black Eyes serenaded us and the rest of town with booming stadium versions of Six Ribbons and Hollywood Seven.

MORE BY B. R. DOHERTY

It was also from that balcony that you accessed the roof, the route we took to track down the maggoty corpse of that possum; its putrefaction having transformed one of our bedrooms from vaguely ripe to uninhabitable within 24 hours.

Once dad and I were up amid that blinding, skillion field of interlocking corrugation, the task was relatively uneventful but it was before and after when we struck trouble.

Being an oblivious and asinine child (see the aforementioned pyromania), I was able to breach the metre-wide gap between the top of the ladder and the edge of the roof without a second thought but my 40-year-old foreman baulked at the prospect and, with knees trembling, spent a good five minutes summoning the courage to execute a climb, which, to a boy still many years from the various muscular and psychological atrophies of parenthood, seemed a doddle.

I'm now seven years older than my father was when he experienced those ladder yips and can report they haven't skipped a generation.

Tomorrow, the rain is coming, bringing the first real chill of the changing seasons with it, meaning two jobs must be undertaken with the aid of my own portable stairway; cleaning the gutters and the flue.

Because we're on tank water, the gutters are unclogged regularly to provide our profligate offspring with hours of unimpeachable shower time, but the flue is an annual undertaking, normally reserved for January when there's zero chance (although, in these days of screwy weather, you never know) of the slow-combustion burner having been used the previous evening.

Two summers ago, I clean forgot to clean the flue because I was preoccupied with approaching bushfires. This year, I've been postponing the grimy operation simply because it's the most onerous piece of maintenance this ornery old property demands of us.

I took on chimney sweeping duties myself after we paid a bomb for someone else to do it during those first, assiduous weeks in a new house and - talking of cavemen - it was while I was out buying the stiff, cylindrical brush one feeds down the sooty pipe, I had a memorable exchange with the bloke who sold it to me.

"Are you married? Have you got a girlfriend?" he asked.

"Um, yeah?"

"Well, get her to wet some old sheets and make a tent around the firebox, otherwise you'll get crap all over your lounge room."

Part of this was excellent advice.

Anyway, today, as I contemplate scrambling from the top of the teetering ladder to the tin, my legs have gone to jelly just like dad's did almost four decades ago.

The statistics back up our hesitancy.

In 2016, the Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health published a study of medical data which showed ladders in our country send about 5000 people to hospital each year and, from 2002 to 2012, admissions jumped by nearly 47 per cent.

Indeed, several years ago, I ruined a much-anticipated bout of long-service leave when, on that glorious first day of holidays, I stepped off a bottom rung and twisted my ankle. Not a particularly dramatic injury, but it was painful, depressing and reduced me to a crawl for weeks, about the pace I keep this afternoon as I gingerly set about prepping the house for its secondary role as elemental harvester.

I've always been a confident climber but in recent times, have devolved from devil-may-care monkey (is there any other kind?) to overly contemplative sloth, who spends too much time picturing his increasingly likely DIY demise.

When back on terra firma lugging my aluminium widow-maker to the shed, the epiphany hits I'll eventually be physically unable to perform the many tasks required to ensure a 19th century weatherboard not only remains viable for its ageing occupants, but stays non-hostile as well.

Living in a rural community, we see a lot of downsizing as twilight couples (and often, sadly, mourning singles) move from their blood-sweat-and-tears acreages into town or directly into care to see out their remaining years unconscripted by the mortal combat of upkeep.

For a houseproud homebody with so many projects yet to complete and still often capable of beating his weakest child in an arm wrestle, such a fate has always been unrelatable but my latest roof-top incursion has crystallised the reality even I'll end up having to bail out of our beloved abode before it kills me.

I suppose you'd call it falling off the property ladder.