This backyard resembles a particular type of backyard you are already familiar with, unless you grew up in the type of place where people had no backyards, or the kind of place where a backyard was maintained by an extra-familial employee. This backyard is overgrown. It is bordered by a chain-link fence that is no longer sturdy enough to reliably keep any thing, or one, in or out. This backyard has tires piled in it. Old ones. Kept with the idea that somehow rubber would return to its war-time value. Kept with the hope that some as yet still un-gleamed child would seek refuge in one as a swing. This backyard is wild and overgrown.
This backyard has stacks of doors strewn about, leaning against the fence, against the peeling-painted house, against the rust and vine marred garage. The doors are stacked in fours. Some have their knobs, some not. Some are still attached to their frames, as if clinging to a bygone career. Others are loose, free, like James Dean or David Bowie. The doors are beautiful. They come in blue, pink, white, green and brown. Their paint peels in lady's fingernails. Their paint peels in carefully grated ribbons. They are retired guardians, no longer protecting the pathway between two places.
Each door had its own life. Who walked through? Who was blocked? When was the blue one shut to keep the monsters out? How did she used to knock on the yellow one before she came in? What poster hung on the back of the green one to be ogled in private moments? How did the pink one bring safety? How did the brown one, slammed, punctuate an argument? Was any one of these the doors a threshold crossed with love?
There was a young family who giddily entered through one of the doors, eager to begin life in a new place. This door was their fresh start. There was an old woman who watched her husband wheeled out through one of these doors on a gurney. This door was their private ending.
Now, this backyard is their zoo. In captivity, the doors have nothing on either side, like mouths vacated of speech. Yet, I stand before one now, compelled to knock.
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