"The old house had a thousand doors in it. All old houses do. You can see them if you know how to look: the noontime shadow of a windowpane crawling with intent across a floor; unmeasured angles of wall meeting wall; fireplaces grown chill with unused years. Archways with unseen contours you can trace with a finger in the cracks as brick grinds against brick in settling walls. Some nights, and some houses are doorways entire, silhouettes against the evening's last light black on black like an opening into a darker sky. You just have to look. An eye-corner glance will do, if you don't turn and stare and explain it away." ~ Michael Montoure Slices
Our farmhouse is old - 150 years, in fact. It has places where doors used to be and places where you imagine doors should be. It has three wooden screen doors. They remind me so much of the doors of the old farmhouse in which I spent a lot of my summers growing up - the grandparents of a family friend. Numerous children all the day long slammed in and out, in and out, of those screen doors; followed by the fruitless admonition - "Don't slam the screen door . . . !" There is such a snugness in the creaking sound of the wood and metal as it rasps back and forth on its hinges. In the humid hot weather, or again in the icy cold, the doors swell and stick - become stubborn. In my childhood, June bugs hung on the screens. Here, on Fat Hummingbird Farm, lacy smears of gold-coloured spider's eggs cling instead. At night, the sound of crickets seeps through the screen mesh.
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