📚 Escape, Right There In Your Hands

Your body might have to stay, but your mind does not.

It was a big wicker basket and it sat by the front door.

Why the front door? I don’t know. We never used the front door.

We lived in the Northeast, after all. Strangers and ambulance guys came through the front door but everybody else went to the back stoop to be let in through the clanging metal screen door. Every house in our neighborhood in Watertown, CT had a metal screen door on the back. The clanging told you when anybody was entering or leaving the house. Poor man’s alarm.

Later, when I was in high school, my parents bought a screen door made out of wood, like they had lost their minds. That was fancy for our neighborhood — and quiet. Wood. How was that ever going to last as long as metal? You might as well be throwing dollar bills out the window, Mrs. Darsh.