Coming Up the Stairs

As I was reading one of Marilyn's jokes this morning, I thought about an incident that occurred shortly after I got married.  The year was 1965 and I was 20 years old.  My husband was in the navy and didn't earn much money as a 3^rd class petty officer. We were stationed in Meridian Mississippi and were on the waiting list for on base housing.

While waiting for military housing, we moved into an apartment on the top floor of an old converted mansion.  Ours was the only upstairs apartment and there were two apartments downstairs.  The house was located on a corner and the lot on the other side was vacant.  There was a door from the outside to one of the downstairs apartments while the door to the second downstairs apartment was located off a foyer just inside the main entrance.   Our front door was located at the top of a long steep staircase at the back of the foyer. There was also an outside wooden fire escape that led from the front porch to my living room door.  On the day we moved into the apartment, we called a locksmith and had a key lock installed on the otherwise unlocked front door, but there were no locks on the other doors or windows.

The house featured huge rooms and high ceilings with lots of shadows and noises typical of old houses.  Our floors creaked when anyone or anything moved in the other apartments and I was unaccustomed to being alone at night in a strange place, so I was understandably a little nervous the first time my husband was going to be away from home overnight.  Although I'm not a "gun person" my husband left several pistols in case I needed them. 

My husband left for work that day shortly after lunch.  Everything was OK until late afternoon when I heard footsteps on the long fire escape staircase.  The steps creaked slowly but steadily as my apprehension increased.  People who knew us knocked on our front door, so I was sure that the sounds on the stairs were being made by a stranger.  Adding to my fear was the fact that a window right next to the front door was easy to open from the outside.  As the visitor reached the top step, I grabbed a pistol in each hand, went to the living room door and scared a poor insurance salesman half to death.