The Foam Pad That Made the Porch Steps Feel Safer

I did not fall. That is the part people skip past when I tell this, and I understand why. A man of 64 sliding half a step on wet porch boards while carrying a bucket of potatoes is not a story that ends well in most tellings. I kept my feet. I set the bucket down. Then I stood there in the cold for a while with my heart going, understanding that something had changed and it was not going to change back on its own.

My doctor was plain about it. My heart was fine. My legs and my balance were the problem, and no pill was going to fix either one. He used the word practice, which I had never once applied to standing up.

My daughter Karen is a nurse two hours away and she is the one who started sending me things. First the seated elliptical. Then the flat bands. Then, about three years ago, the first winter after the bands, a foam pad. The ProsourceFit balance pad, 15.5 inches long, 12.75 wide, 2.25 thick, twelve ounces of foam that does not look like much sitting on a floor.

That is the whole point of it, as it turns out. It does not look like much. Foam on a hard floor makes an unstable surface, and unstable is the work. Standing on it, your feet have to make small corrections the entire time, and those corrections are the practice. The pad is not training you. It is refusing to hold still, and you are training yourself in response.

The first morning I stepped on it I had one hand flat on the dresser and I was glad of it. I lasted about forty seconds. Not forty seconds of anything dramatic, just forty seconds of standing there feeling my ankles argue with the floor. My right knee, which has been stiff for years, wanted no part of it at first.

Forty seconds the first morning, one hand flat on the dresser. That was three years ago. I carry the feed bags up from the barn now without thinking about it.

The second week I got to a minute and a half. By the end of that first winter I could stand on it with both hands off the dresser for two minutes, and I would not call that impressive, because it is not. It is just what happens when you do a small thing most mornings. Twenty five to thirty minutes is my whole routine, five days a week, after coffee. The pad portion of it is four or five minutes at the end.

What I noticed first was not balance at all. It was that I stopped watching my feet on the porch steps. I had gotten into the habit of checking each board before I trusted it, and one morning I realized I had carried a bucket up without doing it. That was the whole payoff, and it was enough.

Then summer came and I found the use I actually care about most. I keep a big garden behind the house, mostly potatoes and carrots and beets, plus butternut and acorn squash. Kneeling on the ground used to end with me pushing off a tomato stake to get up, and the right knee filing a complaint for two days. The ProsourceFit pad goes down between the rows and I kneel on it instead. Getting up off it is easier because I am starting from two and a quarter inches off the ground rather than from the dirt, and it keeps the wet out of my trousers.

Joan uses it too, in the kitchen, with one hand on the counter and the other on the sink. She is 66 and did not have a scare like mine, she just likes the way her ankles feel after. We do not do the same thing on it and that is fine.

The ProsourceFit pad is foam and I will not pretend otherwise. The edges pick up garden dirt and need a wipe. It lives flat on the floor next to the dresser and it is underfoot if I am not paying attention. And it does nothing by itself. A man who buys it and leaves it by the dresser in the box has bought a twelve ounce cushion. I have watched two neighbors do exactly that.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to put it where you will actually step on it, not where it looks tidy. Mine is next to the dresser because that is the only reason I manage it, and the dresser is the only reason I was not nervous the first month. I would tell you that forty seconds counts, and that a stiff knee is not a reason to skip it, it is a reason to hold the furniture longer. I would tell you to ask your doctor or a physical therapist before you start, the way I did, because I am a retired mail carrier and not a trainer and I have no business telling anyone what their legs can take. And I would tell you that the porch steps still get slick in the rain, so I still go down them sideways with a hand on the rail. The ProsourceFit pad did not make me 25 again. It made the walk from the back door to the barn something I stopped thinking about, and at 68 that is a good trade.