Grandma, please get off the ladder

My cousin and I  were talking about whatever teenage girls talk about when I heard a clattering on the roof outside the upstairs window of the bedroom we were staying in. A quick look outside the window confirmed the source of the noise and it didn’t take long for my brain to register who the tuft of gray hair just above the edge of the roof belonged to.

I ran out of the room, down the stairs, through the dining room and the kitchen, and out the front door. To my right was a ladder and on that ladder, luckily only about two and a half feet off the ground was my 88-year-old grandmother. She had a bucket on the porch railing near her and she was cleaning out the gutter. I didn’t want to startle her, but I knew  I needed to get her off that ladder before she fell and broke her hip, or worse, her skull.