More open doors ...

With so many distractions this week, I never did get back to the rest of last Sunday.

Took the long way home from Asbury Park, up the coast to Sandy Hook. The last time I was there, you'll recall, I saw a host of open doors, open gates, entries to places I wasn't supposed to go. This time, when I drove down Officers' Row, all of the front doors were secured. However, when I drove on the service road behind the homes, I saw a young couple coming down the stairs from the back entrance of one of the houses. I'd have thought they were just walking down from looking through the window in the door, but the young man was clearly pulling the door shut behind him.

Now here's a possibility, I thought. The couple looked a little surprised, and maybe worried, that someone had seen them leaving the house, so I kept driving slowly, pulling into the driveway of the house two doors down. I made a point to look as if I was interested only in looking at the disintegrating curtains in the windows of the next house over. Then I slowly walked over to the open door house.

To me, the appeal of the closed houses is more about the mystery of the lives that inhabited them than actually seeing the construction or the layout. One of the houses has already been turned into a museum, so I know what the first and second floors look like. I wonder more about the scraps of things people forgot to take with them when they moved out, why they forgot to take the curtains down, and about the faces that peered back at themselves in those bathroom mirrors.

I really have to get over the creepies I feel every time I go someplace old and decayed. They were starting to come on even as I was looking into the bathroom window of the next-door house, imagining that I'd suddenly see a face looking out of the medicine cabinet mirror. Walking up the back stairs of the open house, the pit of my stomach ground just as it did when I skydived. What am I walking into?

Peering in through the back door window, I saw falling-down peeling paint, cellar door ajar and the hint of a really bad yellow vinyl-covered stool. From a visit to the museum house, I knew the kitchen was to the right. I noticed that the door was unlatched, and when I pushed it a little, it cracked open.

I still couldn't go in. The door opened easily, but I couldn't take that first step in. Instead, I gently pulled the knob toward me to close the door. It still wouldn't fully nest back into the door jamb, having expanded in the salt air. Maybe it was trying to make me think twice about passing up the opportunity. Who knows.