Naming Things

Today's guest post is by (drum roll bitte!), Kevin Tudish. That's right -- the author whose book, health, happiness, LOVE, longevity, peace, prosperity and SAFETY, I wrote and raved about. 
Mister Tudish graciously agreed to crosspost his latest GoodReads blogerini here. Obscenely awesome, n'est-ce pas?
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Sometimes it’s an emotional presence, an image. It’s palpable, visible, but doesn’t immediately articulate itself.

Like the wooden screen door on my grandparents’ house. It’s always the same picture, watercolor and dry brush, faded but vivid, fixed in a time when the difficulties of our lives were uncomplicated.

The aluminum screen was oxidized to a dull silver. The wood was worn smooth and stained where each of us had held it open or stood there swinging it back and forth on the hinges to watch the long spring stretch away from the jamb. Where my grandfather’s hands had passed over it, black from working on the tractor, bloody from dressing game. Or ours, sticky from Turkish Taffy or Sugar Babies, Cokes or the milkshakes my grandmother made. Aunts, uncles, cousins, parents—everyone left a mark there.

 In the winter, it was just an extra step to get into the house.

In the summer, it was our egress to 200 acres of meadows and woods, barns and hay bales. The rope swing in the big oak. The ponds and the creek. The twilight fog and flurry of bats and lightening bugs.

It was our ingress to lunch, when everything outside stopped--the mowing, baling, planting or harvesting: all activity on the farm was centered suddenly around the stove and the table, the sink where we all grabbed for the soap. My grandmother and her daughters, our moms and aunts, brought out the serving plates from the kitchen, filled the middle of the table. We grabbed and passed, assembled our meals. Recapped the morning, planned the afternoon.

Back out the door into the humid summer.

You could yell through the screen, get the attention of someone on the other side without having to move from where you were. You could sit on the porch swing and hear your mom yell from the kitchen for you to run up to the hen house or around to the garden. You could yell that you were off to the creek, or down to the bottom to look for arrowheads.

There was no resistance when you pushed it open, a lazy slap when the spring finally pulled it shut.

There were a hundred things on the farm that we got into—the bank barn full of hay, the horse barn full of old tack, the spring house, the open basement left after the first house burned down, the hollow by Junior’s property, the flat up in the woods where sandstone pushed up through the soil and laurel and ferns thrived in the shade—but that screen door remains my touchstone. And language lets me name the memories.
Crossposted on Goodreads
AND you can read more about Kevin Tudish here -- The Interviewening.