Mid century modern, green shutters,
Original flooring in all the baths. Eat in kitchen and a yard you can easily manage.
Cold breakfasts there, where the kitchen table used to wait. A half cup of orange juice, unbuttered toast and a grapefruit.
Eyes just missing each other over the morning paper, the stiff lilt of songs remade floating from the kitchen radio.
After dinner drinks there in the parlor. Knitting and crocheting and long silences, interrupted by small sighs and wanton glances out the window. Perhaps company would come. They did not come unannounced. How improper.
Perfect patio for summer barbecues. Grease blistered scalps covered by scarves, boiling bodies huddled together under the awning to escape the sun.
Christmas cards drawn up and divided. His and hers. Her family. His family. The living room is perfect for the separate living; the dining room was created for cleaving and tongues sharpened by the after dinner whiskey will do the job nicely.
The windows throughout let enough of the light in though. There are moments that are stifling, that rob you of your breath and you ask if this is all. If your little life will fit into this white house with its green shutters and the basement that is big enough for all your small secrets.
That door is the perfect size to never walk out of. To walk right up to, bag gripped in your palm, the other with the keys to the car you didn’t learn to drive. You would walk through that door. You would.
But there is laundry and dinner and hair and sewing and it can be warm sometimes. And you have known cold.
It is enough, though, to get to the door. Perhaps the next will walk through.
The house sells for a profit, but you will never see it. You are in the ground then, still warm but cooling. The house is let but never again owned. The oak door—original to the house— is swollen shut. No one ever gets through.
Slowly We Unfurl Again 