Doors.

It was a glorious spring weekend here in the Hudson Valley, or at least in my part of it, and I hope it was where you are too -- if you're in the Northern Hemisphere. If not, I hope it was a glorious autumn weekend.

I was sitting on the porch for a while with senior varsity dog Tralfaz, the junior varsity Nipper being out with my wife, enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. I got to thinking about how often I used to sit on the porch before we had the dogs, and the answer was: not at all. Never. It was one of those things we anticipated doing when we bought a house with a porch, and then never did it. 

In fact, I almost never went through the front door at all. In the mornings I would go out and get the newspaper, and then I stopped getting the newspaper because it was awful, slanted garbage. So I might go out the front door on Saturday to get the mail, but the rest of the time I was going through the garage, because if you want to go anywhere in this town, you're driving.

When I was a kid, a lot of families never used the front door. You could always count on someone being in the kitchen, so you'd go around to the back or side of the house and knock on a screen door. Some families' houses were so casual, with kids running through all day in the summer, that you could just go in unannounced. If I'd walked into the Clusky house (name changed to protect the innocent) and started making myself a sandwich, Mrs. Clusky probably would've just said, "Hi, Fred, there's some coleslaw in there if you want." I only saw their front door being used once, when my friend and his brothers and me helped a wheelchair-bound relative through it because the back stairs were too steep.

In my book Faster & Closer, one of the characters noticed the irony:

Unlike everyone else she knew in town, Tina and her family always went in and out of the house by the front door. Having a detached garage was one reason, certainly, but her mother said that any other entrance was for tradesmen. (The weird thing being that, like at her friend Mary Beth’s house, the only person Tina had ever seen enter through the front door was the man from the cable company.)

In mu current neighborhood, the families that regularly use their front doors are those who have dogs or little kids, or those who packed so much crap into the garage that they can't park their cars in them. Say what you will about my lousy storage skills, I've always left room in the garage for the cars.

When we got Tralfaz I rediscovered the front door, because that was the way out to his bathroom and his gym. In fact, neither he nor Nipper have ever navigated the stairs that lead to the garage, so when we drive them somewhere we have to meet them around front like a car service. 

It's been a boon to rediscover the front door, I must say. Sitting out front with the dogs, we've gotten to share smiles and waves with neighbors going by. It's shaded in the afternoon and evening, sunny in the morning when you want more warmth. And I guess all that fresh air isn't going to kill me. At least it hasn't yet.