Twelve steps. From my comfy seat in the living to the front door. I take a dozen regular steps, not my long-paced walking gallop-step when I’m trying to put on speed or drop weight or get home faster. No. Just a gamboling twelve steps. Across the hardwood floor. Spanning the topography of my floral non-Persian carpet that reminds me of a Persian carpet. And then arriving at the French doors with their stained-glass paned inlays.

Outside. Onto the porch and to the next comfy chair, sage green cushioned wrought iron rocking chair.

My indoor comfy chair is beige. Nondescript basic beige but covered in a wrinkled, fleece-fluffy night blue blanket, one that smells slightly of my dogs. My indoor comfy chair has adapted to my body, the perfect niche in the back because I press back into it, press my body into the back of the chair because I like to curl up in my chair and tuck my feet up underneath me even though my mother would complain that said posture destroyed her furniture. Or the fact that my husband complains about my dirty feet, even after I scrubbed them in the shower, because I wear my hiking sandals when I garden or work in the yard.

The living room is ripe acorn brown, that rich brown that gleams with the promise of spring seedlings if the squirrels don’t eat the acorns first or remember where they stowed the acorns the previous fall. And my indoor comfy chair is tucked in the corner, by the bathroom’s door that is still the original door to my 126 year old house. A solid white door with panels and mitered rectangular grooves that I need to dust weekly but I haven’t dusted since March because I was sick and then I was recovering from being sick and then I didn’t care because I wanted to be outside or play on my phone. Maybe I’ll remember to dust and wipe them down tomorrow. Maybe I’ll curl up in my indoor comfy chair and write because I have a new book of prompts (that inspired today’s entry).

Or maybe I’ll do something else. Like pace the twelve steps from my living room down my faded daffodill yellow hallway, the hallway that has the bougie wallpaper that has velvety fleur de lis (or something like that) embossed on it. My yellow hallway that has an arched opening into the mudroom and the French doors at the other end. In the winter, when I’m trying to exercise and it’s too cold and too icy, I will walk laps in my hallway. Up the white l-shaped stairs to the second floor. Down the hallway to my oldest child’s room and if it’s uninhabited into the far side of the room. Turn around. Retrace my steps down the hallway and down the stairs without falling and back through the hallway to the far side of the mudroom where the backdoor waits which I will tap and then turn around and repeat the lap again. And again. And sometimes I will carry cans of pumpkin puree and will lift them like old lady weights.

When I step out of the living room, the “mail table” hugs the left wall. Antique oak, or antique looking oak stained table with claw feet. But it’s only half a circular table. The other half was eaten or doesn’t exist and it’s only supposed to be a half circle table. It conveyed with the house with its red bordered non-Persian rug sibling. The table is a drop zone for mail. I put my mail-cubby on it, the one I purchased at Pier One nearly thirty years ago. I love it because of the pigeonholes, the cubed drawers, the slotted sections for mail. I don’t actually use it to hold mail. It holds my keys and wallet. Old, unexpired gift cards. Membership keytags. My collection of Covid masks from Germany. My hiking bandanas.

On the other wall stands the dust-blue non-grandfather clock. Just a battery powered clock face that has a dead battery in it and so time stands still at 7:03. The pedestal clock has three cubbies in its chest. And in those cubbies are the ashes of my cat, ignomiously named Ugly. And my sweet dog Loki. Who was my companion and friend and confidante and comfort for his thirteen years. Sometimes, my current dogs like to visit with Loki. They sit on the red bordered, floral non-Persian carpet and stare at his blue velvet bag that contains the sealed wooden box of his ashes. His collar is there. A picture tucked in a frame my aunt gave me.

And this wall, where the clock stands, is a rectangular bee hive of white painted wooden panels. At my waist is a chair rail that crowns white painted bead board. This is another area for dusting and wiping down with a damp cloth. This is an area where I run my fingers along the ridges and feel the house’s history. The ghosts that like to sit in the gaps of the stairs or hide in my daughter’s closet.

And then I arrive at the French doors with their oval stained glass inlays. This, swoops of glass curl in and plait around each other, like soft, French style Celtic knots. The door is hollow, modern creation that feels like plastic. But the glass, when the morning sun shines through it, sieves thin, wavery beams of light across the carpet.

Open the left door, ignore its squeaking protest, and step outside onto the front porch. Antique white rails that are smattered with pollen dusty spiderwebs. The porch ceiling is haint blue, an old Southern superstition to scare away ghosts. I once thought I saw a ghost dancing in the front yard in the early morning. It turns out all I saw was my husband’s reflection in the rectangular glass spaning the front door. He wasn’t dancing. He was rotating the laundry.

But still…

And so I’m oustide. On the front porch. With my showered but still grimy feet perched up on the white rail, in spite of the spider webs. A robin carols me from its place in the tree of heaven branches. And cars whisper past my house, driving toward the eastern and western horizon where the sun sets.