I am hewn of northern pine, with dark red paint that once proudly gleamed.  After years of neglect, however, I am sadly diminished to a less-than-beautiful ornament to the house upon which I am hinged. My glass window is streaked with years of residue, and below lies a metal slit for letters--an old fashioned symbol linking me to my history.

I have two views.  On the inside, it is very dim.  Nothing really ever changes.  Sometimes the Owner will shuffle down the stairs, shift the yellowed curtain that laces my window, and let it fall back.  Then he climbs the stairs once more, and all is silent.  For meals, the Owner orders pizza.  I am knocked upon with a polished hand of brisk business, and slowly opened with a pale hand that fears opening me too wide.
On my outside view, anything can change but the Owner’s property. The porch below me is rotten and sinks a little more every year.  The bushes around the porch have long grown wild, and the lawn is never groomed.  Sometimes a Neighbour will cross the road and mow the lawn or shovel the driveway of snow, a tentative gesture of shy friendliness.

The House stood like this, year after year.  Sagging ever so slightly as time wore on -- the overgrown ivy creeping a little farther, making it look even more aged and forgotten.

*   *   *

Then a First happened.  It almost seemed that Firsts had ceased to exist altogether, but that was not true.

*   *   *

A hand of youthful proportions knocked upon me.  First almost doesn’t describe it.  Children avoid this house, dubbing it haunted.  From my outside view, I could see a little boy with scabbed knees and a lopsided smile.  I recognized him, though barely.  He lived across the street.  In his hand was a bulging envelope, which he pushed through the old-fashioned letter slot in my wooden middle.  Then he eagerly trotted off to the sidewalk.  For a moment he paused there, watching me.  But no one opened me from the inside.

That evening, the Owner came downstairs.  He saw the letter, grunted, and tossed it in the overflowing waste paper basket. 

Two days later, the boy reappeared with another letter.  It was also thrown out, as were the two after it.  The only thing that prevented the fifth from going to the waste was that it came unwrapped.  Maybe the boy had run out of envelopes.

When the Owner came down for supper, he saw the letter and stooped to scan the childish scrawl.  His brow furrowed in confusion, until he looked like he might cry. Or laugh. The Owner had a son once. But that is another story. 

It has been a long time since we have received a letter from an eight year old boy.

  After a moment, he went to the wastepaper basket and opened the other letters.  He sat with them for a long, long, time that day.  Then he started reading them aloud.  It was the first time in nearly two decades a human voice filled that lonely house.  Everything was coloured first that day.

“Dear Lonely Man in the House,” he read, “You must be very interesting and must know a lot of stories.  I wonder about you all the time.  Why do you like staying in your house?  Mommy says it’s because your very sad and lonely since your family died.” A long pause here. “I’m going to be your friend for the summer.  You can tell me all kinds of stories and even if you don’t Mommy says it’s a good way for me to be neighbourly.”
The Owner stopped reading.  The letter fell from limp hands and floated across the floor to stop in front of me.

“The boy thinks he can be a friend to an old man like me!” he laughed bitterly.

That night, the TV blared at full volume upstairs, drowning out a sea of grief-riddled thoughts.

*   *   *
The dialogue continued throughout the summer.  Each letter the Letter Boy sent was read in a mask of hardened features. The Letter Boy grew more imaginative. With no information for him to rely on, what could you expect from an 8 year old? The Owner became an affable, friendly, grandfatherly man in his eyes.
I would have expected the Owner to cast away the letters as they became infused with more and more childish sentimentalities but instead he became grimmer and grimmer.  He constantly muttered to himself.  He seemed to be slipping farther away with each new letter.

“How like my son!” he would moan, over and over again.  “My child!  My child!” 

He whispered names that hadn’t been mentioned in the House for years.  Names of the Wife and Son, over and over again.
*   *   *
Seventeen years ago, the House had been a different place.  The Owner had a Wife, and a little boy a few years younger than the Letter Boy.  The House had been happy back then.

It all changed one stormy evening.  The thunder roared and rain flooded the earth like an unceasing waterfall.  As the rain slowly lessened, the Wife and his child left in the car, blissfully unaware they would never return.

The temperature plummeted below zero.

In less than an hour, everything was covered in ice.

Long after the Wife and the Son should have returned, sirens shrieked.  Blue and red lights swirled and danced across my outside front, slightly resembling Christmas lights.  A solid, grim hand knocked upon me.
The Owner threw me open.   He had been anxiously waiting for news, any news.

“I’m sorry,” was all the man from the Christmas-light car had to say, as streaks of freezing rain surrounded us in the storm of the lost woman and son.

*   *   *
  The Owner closed up the entire house.  Curtains shut, myself firmly locked, nobody allowed in to wax words of teary sympathy.  He barricaded his soul, shuttered his grief and tried to forget.  He deadened himself into oblivion.  No one knew this but me.  Doors know these things.

And now, with the simple letters of a boy across the street, the Owner’s memory of the lost was at last being aroused.
*   *   *
  One late August day, I had plenty of goings-on to enjoy from my outside view.  The morning was a lull of hazy summer beauty, muted with blissful laziness.  Children were running up and down the street, not seeming to care that the day was especially humid.

The Letter Boy came outside to join his playmates.  After a while they grew to warm to run anymore, and wandered over to the sidewalk to stare at me, an old pastime.  The Letter Boy confidently began talking about his ideas of the Owner and proudly sharing to the other boys about his courage on daring to send the “old man” letters.  The other boys were impressed.  Hardly any of them even dared to set foot on the lawn for fear the ghosts of the haunted house would leap out at them and murder them in their sleep.

As the Letter Boy continued to brag, one of the older boys stopped him.

“Well if this old man is as friendly as you say,” he scoffed, “go and get him to come to the door.”
The Letter Boy was troubled.  “I don’t know,” he hesitated.

“You’re afraid?” taunted the other boy.
“N-no,” the Letter Boy said uncertainly.
A gust of wind suddenly rose from the west. 

The other boys exchanged grins.  The Letter Boy could not take this.  He stoutly cried, “I’ll show you!” and firmly marched up the pot-holed driveway and up the leaning porch steps.  For a second he stood in front of me.  His face was very white, his lips set, and a fierce determination in his face.

Far in the distance, thunder rumbled.

The Letter Boy did not hesitate a second.  With all his eight year old strength, he pounded me.  There was a pause, and then he hammered upon me again, his knuckles red.

From my inside view, I saw the familiar grey slippers start down the steps.  It seemed to take an eternity for the Owner to reach halfway.

The Letter Boy pounded me again.

The Owner was three quarters of the way down.

“He’s not coming!” the boys shouted from the sidewalk.  The sky, once a blue azure, was now darkening.
The Letter Boy didn’t even notice.  Tears filled his eyes.  His childish dreams were once and for all on the stake.

The Owner reached the bottom of the stairs.

“Come to the door!” cried the Letter Boy.  Tears spilled down his cheeks.  He stared into my window fiercely.
The Owner stopped, hearing the boy’s voice.

“Just open the door!” the Letter Boy wailed.  He didn’t even notice the boys behind him glance at the sky, cast worried glances at each other, and run off.  Thunder rumbled again, louder this time.

The Owner reached me.  He lifted the curtain.

For a split second the boy and the old man stared into each other’s eyes.  The Letter Boy, with watery eyes and two scabbed knees, was seeing the object of his letters.  But where was the friendly grandfather?  There was only a grim face blurred in the streaked glass.  The Owner was seeing the boy who had written letters to him all summer, the boy who was too similar to his dead son.

The second of a gaze filled a century. It was too powerful to hold.  The Owner dropped his eyes, let the curtain fall back, and turned away.  He could not face the boy.

Rain poured down.
“I saw him!” screamed the Letter Boy, turning to tell the other boys.  But they were not there.  The Letter Boy threw himself upon me, twisting my locked handle, banging at me with all of his strength.  Sobs filled him.

“”Come out!” he cried.  “Just come out!  Show them they’re wrong!”

The Owner hesitated.  He almost turned back.  But then he firmly took a hold of himself and marched up the stairs.

Across the street, a girl opened the door to the Letter Boy’s house.

“What are you doing? Don't disturb the old man!” she cried.  “ It’s raining, come inside!”

The Letter Boy glared at me.  He kicked me, forming a small dent in the lower edge of my frame.  And then he turned and ran through the rain to his house, where he was safe from the storm.

*   *   *

The Letter Boy never sent another letter.  His dreams of the Owner were forever over.

*   *   *

An hour later, the Owner came downstairs.  He sat on a stained sofa and shook.  From my inside view I could see him desperately trying to block down the wave of forbidden memories. 

The rain poured down. 

At last he got up, went to a cabinet, and opened a drawer.  Pictures spilled out, of the Wife, the Son, himself.  Lost pictures nearly two decades old.

“No!” he cried.  He moaned like a dying animal. He began to sob, and then wail.  Rocking back and forth on the floor, surrounded with pictures of the past. 

For nearly three hours he sat there, weeping.  It was the first time he’d cried since the night they had died.  Then he sat up and looked at every picture.  An unopened envelope lay folded in the pile of pictures.  It was a forgotten anniversary card from his wife.  The Owner’s hands trembled as he opened it.  But he faced his grief and read the entire thing.  Then he stuffed the pictures in the drawer and cried some more.  That night he went to sleep on the sofa, a picture of the Wife and the Son laughing beside him, as the pounding rain slowed to the alluring rhythm of a lullaby.

I am only a door.  But I have seen so much, that I wonder how many more Firsts I have left.  But tonight was certainly one.  The entire summer seemed to be a First. 

As for the Owner, his story has only just begun.