Real Toads: Doors

One Way to Different Things
“There are things known and things unknown and in between are the doors.” Jim Morrison

This is for the Weekend Mini Challenge at Real Toads. I may post for Poets United tomorrow. I wrote this in the haibun form. I have not yet decided.

Years ago, I walked out our front door to the great unknown – first day of school. I opened the door at school and passed into a strange world full of strange people and strange concepts – having to sit still and be quiet, to color inside the lines, to answer a question with only one correct answer. Doors at my childhood home – going through the back door of our home into the backyard to our kitchen and flower gardens, closing the door of my room which could only be entered with my permission. Sitting on the sill of my window and smoking my first joint with my cousin Billy – opening the door to a different perception of the world. And again later, having sex for the first time, allowing that sweet fellow anthropology student to open a different kind of door to a different inner me. And coming home to open the front door and stepping into a home without my father. With my mother, my arm around her, closing the door to that home for the last time until it was opened again by its new family. Opening the door to my husband and my home and opening the door to the bedroom that used to be my mother’s. Empty now.

The transition of the seasons – spring stepping forward and closing the door to winter behind her and then, after the passage of a few moons, opening the door to summer. Summer in a brief fling of heat and passion, mellowing out to step into autumn, falling through that door and getting ready for winter’s sleep. Quietly closing the door and resting until awakened by the first robin. Jumping up and springing into a time of new growth. A wreath of fresh cedar and oranges on my front door for Winter, silk pink cherry blossoms for spring, a plain homemade wreath of dried vines for that persistent little wren who builds her nest there. We don’t use the front door so she and her family are safe. We always us the back door which leads into the kitchen and where most people seem to stay – ignoring the door into the living room. People who enter for the first time almost always say – look at all the doors! you have a zillion cabinets and, are they really truly real maple? No false doors in my kitchen!

The final door – loved ones and friends can wait with us outside but we can only open and step inside to the other side alone – going from the life we know into the space of the unknown on the other side. A plain door that swings only one way and with no windows for those outside to see inside.

seasons’ doors open
and close – flowers bloom and fade –
always a mystery

Duke U Chapel Doors – Getty Images