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For John and Sheri Hart
NONFICTION By David Grandouiller
Sangria is the color of the front door frame – like a permanent Passover, but no one enters there,
let alone the angel of death. I like that. You’ve done away with the cold formality of doorbells and
entryways, of limp handshakes, coat closets, the awkward smalltalk which is the required atone-
ment for friendship. The blood-colored door-frame has paid your debt to all those tired rituals. It
baptizes the house in a red warmth that welcomes strangers with familiarity, through the side door,
into the kitchen, into communion, the breaking of bread and of barriers.
Into the space and comfort of your living room come your cousin and your second cousin. Friend.
Stranger. Your Matthew-five neighbor. Line them up, the ghostly memories of them, the redness of
their faces, the light reflecting in dilating pupils that see (or ones that don’t) the warm colors, the
ceiling beams like welcoming arms reaching from wall to wall. Imagine how many have been here;
see lives filling up the room until they can’t help but touch one another as you have touched them.
I feel so mischievous with one foot through the window – like one hand in the cookie jar, like one
eye over the newspaper, like one ear to the keyhole – of your blue room. My window, you’ve told
me, but if it’s mine then why do I always feel like I’m trespassing as I set my foot on the impossibly
small classroom desk-chair (if there’s a word for that, I don’t know it) under the sill?
When my grandfather was only a father, he came home, key-less, one night to a locked front door.
He climbed his way in through my uncle’s window. I feel like that: a welcome intruder, breaking
in without breaking anything.