We are waiting.

“Any symptoms yet?” the doctors ask.

“There will be symptoms,” the doctors say, a warning forecast with that raspy edge to the message. As if the symptoms prowl the perimeter and lurk in the atmosphere, kind of like bird flu. But this isn’t a virus, it’s a tumor and the more it grows the more it will interfere with basic functions such as balance and coordination.

Left side first. Right side second. Or headaches. Maybe one morning. One night. Then more nights. Days when even extra-strength Tylenol doesn’t help. What helps?

Yesterday, we took our usual walk. Not far, avoiding the steep hills. He walks with poles to prevent a second fall. He’s slower. I walk ahead, sometimes too far ahead. Then he can’t hear the story we are listening to. One of our high-tension thrillers set in the great north woods, where good and evil direct the plot and keep our steps apace.

The audiobook is on my phone. My phone is in the hood of my coat. When cars whiz by, we miss a few sentences. Lately, we have to stop to admire this winter’s ice floes on the Connecticut River, listening for soundings and moans. Two competing dramas: our river’s ice breakages and the story’s perils in the Upper Peninsula.

Oh yes, and one more drama — balance and coordination — the symptoms. Yesterday, he stumbled. Nothing? Something? A symptom?

A decade ago, we walked the Coast-to-Coast pathway in England. While carrying a heavy backpack, he forded rushing streams, stepping stone to stone, never a slip; hoisting me when my hips were no match for the stiles that link farm pasture to farm pasture to preserve the ancient rights of way. He didn’t tire, complain or stumble, not from the Irish Sea to Robin Hood’s Bay on the Atlantic. A pint of shandy at the finish line.

I’ve noted before that he is reluctant now to go in the ocean unless others can secure his footing amid the swirl of currents and shifting sands. He, who used to take our kids into stormy, roiling waves, assuring us all that they were safe, that he would keep them safe. And he did. So yes, we are giving up parts of ourselves these days.

To age, first of all. To our frailer selves second, and now to those hovering symptoms.

But you — the symptoms — hold your horses, don’t be too sure of yourselves. Just the other day, it was our guy who crated up the recyclables and hauled them off to the dump. Not a quiver to be seen. Soon enough, he will take down the Christmas tree that still holds onto its needles.

And last night, when the furnace, for some reason known only to itself, shut down and the house was getting colder and colder, he fixed it. Problem-solving with the help of helpers wielding phones and the internet to locate a hidden reset button. Then, with the push of the button came the welcome grumble of heat.

But this is not a metaphor. It’s real life. We, all of us, don’t have hidden reset buttons. What we have is each other, our communities, two walking poles and the determination to put one foot in front of the other as long as possible.

Ruth Charney lives in Greenfield.