The Perfect Thing

I live in an old house with drafty windows, not enough outlets, and no square corners at all. It has lots of character though. And it has some really, really beautiful features that made us fall in love with the house, including a lovely old front door that's made of panes of beveled glass framed in dark oak. So it's a little hard to explain why we had the door covered, for years, with a nondescript curtain. (It came with the house. See what I mean? Embarrassing.)

Anyway, we'd always meant to replace the unappealing curtain. We only needed to decide what we wanted instead.

And then, one day, figuring that we only lacked the proper motivation, I got rid of the curtain. I've seen this sort of thing before, where as long as you have something good enough, even when it's not actually all that good, like an old sofa from the thrift store, you will have it forever. I suppose that would be a good moral for a story on sustainability, or reduce, reuse and recycle, which is not what this story is about.

So anyway, we were left with a wonderful view of our lovely, beveled glass front door, and absolutely no privacy. And it worked. We were motivated.

One day while my husband and I were out having lunch together, I pointed out the pretty pane of framed stained glass hanging in the restaurant window. "That's what I want for our front door," I told him. "It doesn't cover the whole window, but it covers most of it. And it's pretty. That would work."

He pointed out the obvious - that with glass clanking against glass every time we open and close the door, something is going to break.

I pointed out the obvious - that I'm not quite that stupid. Of course I didn't mean actual stained glass. Just something like that. A wall hanging made of cloth, maybe.

OK. That made sense. We agreed.

Time passed, and we kept our eyes open for the perfect thing, while carefully not walking around half naked in the vicinity of our front door, or at least I did. It's possible my husband forgot. I mean about the perfect thing, not about not walking around in our underwear. Mostly.

One day we were having lunch together again in that same restaurant. (It's a really great restaurant.) And I pointed to the stained glass and said again that I wanted something like that for our front door.

And once again my husband said, "But not stained glass, because that would break."

And once again I agreed.

And so we went to an art fair, which was the perfect opportunity to look for the perfect thing for our front door - the stained glass-like thing that wasn't stained glass - that would restore our modest standing with our neighbors and finally replace the unattractive curtain.

And we found it.

And what do you suppose we found? Do you have to ask? We found stained glass, of course. It was beautiful, and it was perfect. Except for, oh yeah, the whole being stained glass thing.

We rolled our eyes at ourselves, and then we walked away. We thought that maybe if we kept looking we'd find something else, something perfect that wasn't made of stained glass. Maybe we would return and find we'd changed our minds, and the stained glass thing wasn't really perfect after all. With luck, we would return and find that it had been sold to someone else. But instead, we returned, and it was still there, and it was still perfect. And we bought it, and we hung it, and it's perfect.

It turns out that you can put little silicone bumpers on the corners, so the clanking isn't too bad. And you can be kind of gentle when you open and close the door. And you can remind yourself of the intrinsically transitory nature of beautiful things made of glass, like doors, and stained glass, and such. And you can share a little laugh with your husband over human foibles and the blessing of frivolous problems.