June 12, 2015--Best of Behind: Screen Doors

This was first posted on June 21, 2010--

We needed some work on our screen doors. The one on the road side, the other the bay side. Rich Cash who was working on them said that an old wood screen door was something to take good care of. “They don’t make them like they used to” was the way he put it.

“Look at how they fit the pieces together. No one does it like that anymore. Yes, the new ones, wood ones included, may give you a better seal but when these swing closed on their hinges they make a sound that just says ‘summer’ to me.” And to us. Very much to us, I thought

So when he recommended that he take them to his shop so he could replace the screening in the right way and also rehab them—not to change them in any essential way, but to give them there once-in-every-eighty-year reconditioning—we were agreeable to letting him take them. He said that it wasn’t buggy and he could get them back to us by the next morning, early the next morning, and through the evening and over night we probably wouldn’t be missing them. He smiled, “You’ll miss that solid thump sound, that I know. But it will make it that much the nicer having them back tomorrow. Good for at least another 80 years,” he promised.

I said, “I should live that long.”

So he took them down and noticed that the hinges themselves were “hinge bound”—“You see how metal touches metal?” He flexed the hinges to show us. “This means the door won’t close smoothly or all the way. That’s what all the salt in the air does to ‘em. Eats right into them. You can’t expect them to last forever. Or for that matter,” he nodded toward me, “anything.”

“What should we do about them?” Rona asked.

“I’d replace them,” Rich said. “I have a few old brass ones back in my shop still in good shape so, if you’d like, when I bring the doors back I could replace them.”

That sounded worth doing and we agreed to that too.

Rona said, “These doors are worth good treatment. Look how long they’ve taken care of the families that lived here. We want them to do the same for us.”

“And don’t forget that thump,” Rich said with a wink as he finished loading them gently into his truck.

It was the first hot evening of late June and, as we do on such days, when the air cools down, as it always does, to replace the air in the cottage that had been heated up through the day, we open both doors to allow the cool air to replace the hot. A rush of air occurs like a natural form of air conditioning.  And Rich was right, few bugs were out toward dusk; and even without the screen doors we were fine, just fine as the house filled with air that had been chilled by the water.

I was on the daybed making my way through a book of Raymond Carter stories, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, about men who step out on their women who in the process got stepped on by life. Spare, lapidary-like stories where just a word or the name of one of the forlorn characters can tear at your heart as they daily pronounce another doom. Perhaps a little dark for this sunny situation, but real life of the Carver type abounds here too and there is no one better at representing it. So I read on.

Rona, stretched out on the sofa, is revisiting May Sarton. Her exquisite journals of life on the Maine coast.  A House By the Sea, I think she is reading, the first one in Sarton’s exploration of the meaning of a life of solitude. Reading all six or seven of them last summer while we were renting this heatless cottage convinced Rona that this was a place for her, for us, to spend some real time struggling with the isolation and elements.

We’re now approaching the year’s longest day; and since the sun doesn’t set across the bay on the Christmas Cove side until almost 9:00, we can read well into the evening without turning on a light. May Sarton style.

With less than a half hour of light remaining, out of our peripheral vision we saw something fly in through the unscreened bay-side door and flap into the kitchen. “Must be a big bug,” Rona said, putting Sarton down.

“I saw it too,” I said, putting Carver down, not entirely unhappy to get some relief from my reading—yet another husband had just emotionally abandoned his woman. “Let me see if I can kill it.” In the previous story Dummy, a quintessential Carver invention, had murdered his wife with a hammer and then drowned himself. So you can see killing and death were on my mind.

“No need to do that,” Rona implored me. “Just try to get it to fly back out. You know, get behind it with a newspaper or something and direct it toward the door. I’ll get you a towel. That should work.”

“Good idea,” I said. I wanted back from Carver’s world. As little swatting and killing as possible. “This is not much of a problem. We’ve had the doors open for two hours and this is the first bug I’ve seen.”

I was standing by the entrance to the kitchen looking around for the insect. It was quite a large one from what I had seen of it and thought it would be easy to spot and then guide toward the door.

“I think it’s a mouse,” Rona said. She was now standing next to me with a hand towel from the bathroom.

“That can’t be,” I said. “We both saw it fly in. Mice don’t fly.”

“Of course I know that. But look over there. One the floor.” She was pointing. “See that little head? I don’t have my glasses on but that looks like a mouse to me. Maybe we have both a bug and a mouse. I’m having second thoughts about having let Rich take the screens.”

“I think it’s a bird. A little sparrow.” Now I was pointing.

“I see. You’re right. It’s a bird.”

And with that, it flapped its wings frantically and flew toward one of the windows. The big glass one that looks out over the lawn to the water. He slammed into it repeatedly thinking, because the slant of the light made the glass invisible, that it opened to the outdoors.

“She’s going to kill herself,” Rona said all concerned.

“I don’t think so,” I said, “Maybe he’ll knock himself out and then we’ll be able to pick him up and take him outside. We’ve seen that happen before with birds crashing into windows, not knowing they’re there. Knocking themselves out and then when they come to they just pick themselves up and fly away as if nothing had happened. Maybe that will happen to him.”

The bird continued to thrash around and slam into the glass. There was no sign that he was slowing down or close to knocking himself unconscious.

“We can’t just stand here watching her kill herself. You need to so something. Like I said, take this towel, get behind her, and try to direct her out the door.”

So I did. I walked as slowly and silently as I could into the kitchen and positioned myself behind where the bird was still thumping into the window, thinking that I might then be able to gently encourage him to fly toward the open door.

I did manage to make this happen. More or less. More because the bird did fly back into the living room closer to the door; less because he was now busy smashing himself into one of the large windows there.

“This is not working,” Rona said even more upset. “We can’t let her kill herself. Use the towel to try to grasp her. Carefully of course. And then walk her to the door and release her.”

“Good idea,” I said, “but easier said then done.”

“Try it, would you! Don’t just stand there! She’s helpless and more and more frantic. Poor thing.”

By then the bird had fluttered into one of the corners of the room and, seemingly panting for breath, sat on the windowsill. I could see the condensation on the windowpane from his quick breaths. He didn’t or couldn’t move or try to avoid me as I slowly closed in on him towel outstretched.

“Have you got her yet? I’m worried that her heart is beating so fast that it will give out.” I moved in closer. “Do you have her?”

“Just about,” I whispered. “I think this is going to work.” And with that, as quickly and carefully as I could, I reached out to cover the sparrow with the towel, which I succeeded in doing, and gently grasped his palpitating little body. A flurry of feathers from his wings came loose and fluttered to the floor.

“Oh God,” Rona said, “Look what happened. I‘m not sure you should release her. Will she be able to fly after losing all those feathers?”

“I don’t know,” I said as I moved toward the screenless door, holding the bird in the towel before me as if it were an offering. “There’s only one way to find out.” And with that I let the towel fall away and with the bird itself in my hands I set him free. He dropped to the deck, flapping his wings furiously. They twapped the deck but he was not able to lift off.

“I don’t think she can fly,” Rona said. “Just what I was worried about. Now what should we do? Should I call . . .?”

But before she could complete the thought the bird rose from the deck and flew toward where I knew there was a nest in the bayberry bushes.

“I think he’ll be all right,” I said with relief.

Rona, smiling, was bathed in the last light of the day.

I was up, as usual, very early the next morning and went out into the garden to check on the rosa rugosa bushes we had planted the day before. From the bedroom window it looked as if one was wilting and I thought I would give it some water in order to try to revive it.

There’s a small path back to where the roses are and, to avoid the wet grass, as I stepped carefully on the granite stones that lead back there, there was, hopping along right behind me, a small sparrow. Just like the one we had freed the night before. It can’t be, I thought, there is no way it can be him. Or might it be?

There is no way of knowing. But he did fly up to and perch on the rose bush I had come out to check. It is not the kind of thorny bush where these birds usually come to rest. And he did remain there, struggling to keep his balance, as I poked around the root ball to see if it had retained the water we had doused it with when we set it in the ground.

The bush seemed fine. The leaves were not drooping. But it had been good to check. The bird remained on its highest branch as I turned back toward the house; and, as when I had gone out along the path, the bird fluttered off and followed me, not more than a few feet behind, as far as the steps up to the deck.

I couldn’t wait for Rona to get up so I could tell her what had happened. When she did, still half asleep but excited, she said she was convinced it was the bird from the night before. “There’s no other explanation. Birds don’t act this way. Follow you on the path or fly right up to you as you do your gardening. Unless maybe if you feed them. Which you weren’t doing. So it must have been her.”

The next three mornings, up again at dawn, I went to check that same bush. Thinking, as I am prone to do at that time of day, before I resume my worldly ways, that it was our rose bush.

But there was no sign of the sparrow. Maybe, I thought, he had retuned to the small flock that typically at this time of day work the bayberries in search of ripening berries or the proverbial early worm.

So, after a few days of fruitless waiting, I returned to my life and routines as I assume he had to his.