A Small Door - Jackie Davis-Martin

In the dream the door, like the others, opened into a shed of sorts, a small room filled with ice and snow. That was at first. When she returned (and who knew why she was returning?) she felt she should clear them. She had a shovel. The first room, the first shed that is, was satisfying in that she scooped up the slush and tossed it outside, exposing the wooden floor, making it useable she remembered thinking although as I write this I’m not sure what it was useable for. Heartened, she moved to the next room, with her shovel. These rooms were separate entities, separated, accessible by a step or two, but the next room had had its sludgy ice, its frozen mounds, now transformed to small sculptures of ice which hung by red threads or ribbons. Strange she hadn’t noticed that before, had thought the ice was all of one piece, but it wasn’t; it was of discrete sculptures, maybe angels, maybe birds, so jammed together they appeared at first to be one ice cluster. She reached for a small, narrow bird—or angel-- on its red streamer and put it in her purse. Maybe it would last; maybe it would be glass when she looked at it again.

How would she reach her mother? How would she let her know that there would be someone waiting to pick her up in the ice and snow so the woman wouldn’t be anxious? The phone number was back at the house, back at a house, maybe hers, and she didn’t have a copy of it, nor any way of returning in the snow, which was thick, but pleasant, too, really. Her mother was part of some shared-number cooperative and there was no way of calling and asking about it either. Well, they would be there. She and someone else, a man.

The third door was open as she approached, blocked by a great wedge of ribbed ice, as though a cascade of water had tumbled upon itself and froze just like that. She slid her shovel, a shovel now flat and silver and sleek as the spatula I use for getting salmon off the grill—only larger, of course—under the great wedge and moved it, in its completeness, out of the doorway. The window in the room also had a frozen overspill, much like a window box hanging into the room, thick with frozen symmetrical modules, and at first she turned the shovel over to perhaps hack at it, to knock it down and push it from the room, but then she noticed the beauty of the ice here, too, too beautiful to push aside, to destroy. She’d leave it that way, although god knows how they’d manage around it. Maybe others would admire it, too. She marveled that she hadn’t seen, the first time through, the sculptures in this room, either, next to the window box, the glossy ice formations. How had she missed such beauty?

Her watch said her mother was in the air right now. She’d go back to the house.

You, dear reader, have questions, don’t you? Who is the woman? How old is she? Where exactly is she? A tundra? A tundra of frozen shacks with small doors? Is she even wearing boots? I’ll try to answer. In some ways the woman is me, but she’s too young, isn’t she, worrying about a mother that died fifteen years ago, died then at over eighty? In other ways the woman is my daughter, back East in all the snow, sealed into her apartment for days and marveling over the formations of ice over her plants and deck chairs. The mother in the air would in that case be me because I often fly out to see her, to see my daughter, except not this weekend.

The anxiety is surely my own because it hovers always in one disguise or another, here a mother in the air, unsettled. The ice and snow should be fearful but they are not; they are beautiful discoveries in little rooms; they are what I wasn’t aware of at first. I like to think that those rooms of ice and snow are my writing. It’s easy to walk by the small door and not see it at all, hidden as it is by something else, but once inside, well, there it is: a discovery I hadn’t considered, hadn’t imagined before.

But entering doors of frozen rooms was my dream last night, and the door was this morning’s prompt, There are no end of small doors, really.

The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
A sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice!
--Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Kubla Khan”