Outside Intention

          Outside Intention

The door knob was set firmly in a solid dark brown oak door. Solid except for a tiny peephole that Agatha had to climb up to see through. When no one, especially her parents, was looking, she would carry her little wooden stool out from it’s hiding place in the hall closet and put it up against the door. She had been doing that for a really long time ~ at least since her birthday last year. She could see green fields and softly rounded hills. Tall trees and a lake. Maybe it was really an ocean like the one she read about in her book about Riding On the Ocean. Were the trees really part of a magical forest? Agatha never once thought of opening the door. The big oaken door was reserved for guests. At least that’s what she had come to believe. It was always the head maid, Serena, looking more stern than serene, that opened the big oaken door with the shiny golden knob. 

The other maid, Glyndel, polished all the golden brasses and silver in the house, including the big golden door knob. Agatha would be allowed to polish the doorknob but was warned never, ever to open the big door. “You’re too little and you never know what or who will be on the other side of that door. If you want to go outside, Cook will let you out through the kitchen door.”

So she polished and polished til she could she her face in it. It was all curvy and funny. But more than that, as Agatha grew she kept a secret desire in her heart to just turn the doorknob and see what it was like to feel the click, feel the big door swing slowly open. She really was bigger now, because she didn’t have to stand on her tiptoes on the stool to see through the peephole. And so, one day, while she was polishing the doorknob, and Glyndel had gone to the kitchen, and with two hands, she turned the shiny golden globe ever so carefully.

Agatha was so surprised when the door opened that she quickly closed the door and polished the doorknob furiously. Now that she had opened the door, she wanted to open it again. She wasn’t too little and now she wanted to see the front outside, not through a peephole but through a wide open door. The secret desire to just turn the doorknob had been satisfied, and had grown just a bit bigger. To see outside, to find magic, and whatever or whoever could be on the other side of the big brown oak door with the shiny golden knob.

"There is always one moment in childhood 

when the door opens and lets the future in."

~ Graham Greene