Between Places

Abstract

This chapter describes the author’s experiences as a person with cerebral palsy and the difficulty of walking in winter across “between places”: transitional spaces such as the strip of grass between a sidewalk and street. Such spaces are often ignored by nondisabled people when they clear away snow and ice, exposing disabled people to the risk of injury. The essay shares three different stories of having to traverse between spaces and uses both memoir and disability studies scholarship to highlight the fact that, though nondisabled people are aware that the disabled are among them, they tend not to imagine that people with disabilities can and may be everywhere—and should be.