Doorways

   On a day near the end of summer, I walked up the few steps of the house I grew up in, and pulled open the screen door. The wooden outside door was opened, propped back against the row of windows in the old summer kitchen, so called because in the age before air conditioning or even electricity for fans, in the time the house was built, cooking during  the stifling heat of summer was too much to be endured, so a little oil burner stove in a room built off the kitchen was a luxury in the homes that had anticipated the need.
     There was another door, this one with glass panes at the top, that led to a small room at the bottom of a stairway and at the top of the cellar stairs. This door was always closed, else it would bang against the cellar door, which was, of course, always kept closed. The third door in that little room, also kept closed, led into the kitchen.
      I walked into the kitchen as I'd done thousands upon thousands of times and found my mother and Helen in the middle room.  Each was seated in their chairs in front of two of the room's doorways, my mother in her upholstered chair near the propped-back kitchen door. In all the years I lived in and visited the house, I don't recall that door ever being closed. My mother hung her pocketbook on that doorknob, against the wall, out of sight.  Helen was seated in a rocking chair, in front of the closed closet door and the door to the front hallway, this door still open, as was usual in warm weather.
    From the looks on their faces, they'd  evidently been in deep conversation,and  a serious one,  not the norm for them because neither was the contemplative type. They were quiet as I entered the room, and my mother said, "We were just talking about how we got so old. It came so sudden."
   If the year was 1980, and it could well have been, my mother would have turned 75 and Helen would have been approaching her 80th birthday. I suppose something about the significance of their landmark birthdays, counting down  their mortality, might have triggered the nostalgia for their younger days. Or maybe they had felt a gust of late summer chill and were made aware of  the approach of winter and the inevitable onset of a lasting chill.