Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [34]
And we bought a new pair of storm doors, beautiful ones, which brings me back to the finches. The house had a narrow double front door, still sporting its figured brass hardware, patterns half-obscured now with a hundred years of paint—handsome doors, but not very practical ones, since it was impossible to effectively block their drafty cracks and seams. For a while we sealed them off with plastic, six months of the year, and then it seemed time—the rest of the house was at least that much ready—to use the front door as it was meant to be used. At a salvage company I found just the right thing—for the proverbial arm and leg, but it was grant money, and it was for our house. Oh rationalization that justified many an expense we couldn’t afford, many an hour spent in the hard folding chairs of auctions, many a Saturday rooting in some collapsing barn! Just the right thing was a pair of oak doors, multipaned; they were french doors, really, but with the right varnish and framing they made the most splendid storm doors imaginable. It was the storm door raised to the level of art, and so the entryway of the house took on its proper dignity, a happy transition from the outer world to the inner one. At Christmas they were best, decked out and inviting.
It’s true the invitation was mostly to ourselves, and for a few good friends at the college where I taught, since we fit into our little Vermont town none too well; we were the only out gay male couple in the whole place, and though we were thoroughly accepted by the town’s liberal community (that over-layer of exiles which make Vermont culture tolerable) we were strange new creatures to the ur-layer of native Vermonters who made up the town’s human bedrock. And who, significantly, made up most of our neighborhood. Our house wasn’t cheap just because the floors sagged; it took us a while to learn what people meant by that insistent talk about location.
But we had a world for ourselves there, and one very real advantage to living with a window designer was that he could make anything look good—the right arrangement, a little fussing with the details: splendor! The high ceilings accommodated a huge tree at Christmas, thus making use of the ornaments Wally had been squirreling away for a lifetime, souvenirs of other people’s childhoods collected at a decade of yard sales: Bohemian glass beads strung into crystalline snowflakes, great garlands of shimmering glass, an under-tree world of ancient toys. The big granite cellar was perfect for the universe of display props Wally used for store windows. For me, a realm of gardens, borders of perennials out front (against the now properly white picket fence, every new picket of it cut with my own hands) and herbs and vegetables out back.
And doors to deck. One Christmas we made boxwood wreaths from cuttings I took from the ruins of a formal rose garden at the college; one hung on each of the gleaming oak doors. They looked so classic, and lasted so long, that by early spring they were still hanging there, plain without their ribbons and trim, cheerful and promising—qualities which Vermonters need desperately, suicidally, in February and March.
This is where the house finches come in. I noticed that every time I opened the door there’d be a buzz of winged activity, something hurrying through the branches of the wide old lilac. And every time we’d come home, a parallel commotion. Soon we saw what the fuss was about, which was the house these two new colonizers had made for themselves, a woven bowl of grasses and straw nestled into one of the wreaths, built against the glass. At eye level! We stopped using the front door right away, and rigged a system