There’s an arbor in my neighborhood that I drive past every day. Sturdy pre-fab construction, what looks to be bare, untreated wood. It catches my eye not because it’s beautiful, but because it is goofy. It’s the placement of the thing that gets me. It’s plopped a third of the way into the front yard of the house.
It is not arching gracefully over a walkway or path. Nor does it draw the eye through to focus on a lush planting. Furthermore, it’s not an accidental placement of the thing. It’s been sitting on that front-yard grass, bare as a bone for its second summer now, and it looks as though it’s going to stay there. It looks as though someone had a Jack Daniels break on chore day, went to Bachman’s, dumped two hundred dollars on a three-sided pine box, hauled it home, stood it up in the yard, passed out, and then woke up the next day and decided to leave it where it stands as a physical reminder to remain sober while landscaping.
I’m not saying that as a judgment, merely as an observation.
I live a couple of blocks away from the house that boasts this oddity, and I don’t know the people who live there. The rest of the house seems well-kept and ordered, at least from the outside, which only makes the Doorway to Nowhere that much more puzzling.
So, I’m out having coffee with my groovy artist pal, an old friend I haven’t seen in a while. He travels around a lot, and because I pretty much stay in the same place, I know we’ll always catch up sooner or later. He knows where to find me. It’s been more than a year since we’ve spoken, and when he asks me how I’ve been lately, the floodgates release. “My dad is sick! My kids are growing up fast! We have no kitchen countertops! The family dog had to be put to sleep!” Life is hardly falling in around my feet, but suffice it to say, there’s been a fair amount of nuttiness in the last twelve months. The next thing I know, I’ve been talking his ear off for thirty minutes straight and for the last ten I’ve been ranting about the arbitrary arbor. Of all things.
My old pal, he laughed in all the right places and didn’t question my hopscotching brain patterns. I finally ran out of gas, and he took a pull off his hand-rolled cigarette, and a slurpy sip from his sugary coffee treat. And when he spoke, it wasn’t, “Aw, hell, baby, I’m so sorry about your dad.” Or even “The dog too, huh? Well that’s the pits, man.” Nope. It was “Colleen, how do you know that the archway doesn’t lead anywhere?”
I stifled a wild urge to sink my teeth into his gentle hippie windpipe. Instead, I calmly said, “Well, that’s because I can see through it. That, and the last time I checked, I wasn’t living inside a Doctor Who episode. Just in case you’re wondering, I’m certain it’s not haunted either. No unexplained deaths in the neighborhood, no smell of sulfur.”
“Sure seems to be haunting you.” He laughed.
“Say that again but next time, cue the sitar music.”
“Seriously, think about all the things in life that you feel you know are real, but you can’t see. Your idea of God and the hereafter. Divine reprisal for unrepentant souls. Maybe you don’t see anything on the other side of that arbor, and what bugs you is that you feel you’re supposed to. By all the rules of gardening, an archway is supposed to lead somewhere. To your eye, this one doesn’t, and that sticks in your craw so much that you’ve become obsessed by it.”
“Obsessed is a pretty strong word.”
“Is it? I don’t see you for a year and a half, all this stuff is going on in your life, and you ramble on about a stupid garden feature that’s not even in your own yard?”
My morning commute takes me past the arbor and every day I still look up at it. I’ve become accustomed to the weird, bare wood arch standing stark on a plain green patch of grass. Now I’ve begun thinking of it as a pass-through that leads to everywhere, instead of a doorway that connects to only one room. A conceptual thoroughfare leading past illness, strife, and financial crunches, with wayside rests for joy and contentment and ridiculous old friends who smoke fragrant curls of tobacco and untangle thought snarls.
It’s like a little South Minneapolis Stonehenge. A primitive calendar that reminds me each day that passes is an occasion to believe.
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