Marks On a Door Frame

    She stood against the door frame and faced forward, but she was wiggling too much. “Stand Still” he told her, and there was a smile in his voice when he said it. She looked up at her dad. “And toes together, put your back against the wall…” He was looking at the straight edge he held at the top of her head, and drawing a bold line with a permanent black marker. 

   When she stepped away from the door frame she had to raise her eyes to see the new mark. “Look how much you’ve grown!” He said, and gave her a little pat on her back. Together they studied the space between the new line and the one before it…and the one before that. Parallel lines going all the way down to the first one, just over a foot above the floor. It was a ritual they had been attending to since before she could even stand up. 

    Right after he added that twelfth line, they had walked out onto the porch to stare across the wavy grasses stretching over the large field in front of their house. She can remember the particular smell of the air that night, a certain moistness and the slivers of a cold, threatening updraft. A low rumble off in the distance, the thunder chasing clouds from the bright sky, the wisps of grayness threading through. The mutter of her dad as he walked off toward the barn, “I had better shut the goats in tonight.” The doorframe was whole then, the house standing neatly around it, in the proper manor. Gwen still had trouble understanding how some memories could remain so clearly, while others had faded so far and become blurry even as she reached for them. 

   Storms ran though the midwest more often than you’d like to imagine. It wasn’t as if it rained often, the grass could be parched and crisp from the sun, but when that wind started up it would push right through with nothing to block its forward force. Today was calm, curtains barely rustling as she made her way around the house, stopping in front of the door frame in the hallway. Why couldn’t she remember the marking of her fourteenth year? Or the one after that? The main thing she remembered about her fourteenth year was that she hadn’t gotten the bike she wanted, and that she was still going to be riding around on the old clunker forever! As if anything at fourteen would be forever, Gwen now thought. The board on the doorframe had been pieced back together, and although there was still a chunk missing at the bottom, and the large shaggy crack running jagged down the middle, it had been attached to the new doorframe so that you could still mostly make out all the old lines, faded but rising until they stopped at roughly the level of her current height. Gwen snorted. 

   Her father had been stubborn, that was for sure. When the storm finally came that would pull apart the house it wasn’t anything Gwen was prepared for. It turns out you can stand strong against relentless wind, but those twisters trick, and tear to shreds. Her father had been with her at the house, and they hadn’t thought too much of it. They had finished getting the animals in and secured the doors, and she was strong enough to move the sandbags across the front. As they were walking back to the house they had noticed it forming in the sky overhead, both of them going rather silent studying the dark clouds, clearly gathering into a long funnel touching the ground, jumping across the sky. His voice was calm, and quiet, “ok, so now here’s what we’re going to do…” and he took her hand as they went into the house, crouched in the hallway. He held her as the screeching pierced her ears, as the walls ripped off. He still had an arm over her as they came to again in the rubble, dazed, wiping their eyes. 

   His leg couldn’t be saved. He eventually got good at moving around on the artificial one, but long before that, while they were still clearing out the wreck of their home, he had hobbled around with crutches on the one leg. She could picture the awkward way he leaned down to pull out the broken boards of the door frame, carefully setting them to the side.

   The new house was smaller than their old house, because that was what they could afford. Built just several feet from the old house, on a new foundation, it was just two rooms- her room and the living room/kitchen. They never did build back the barn. Her dad had slept on the couch after that which she didn’t really think about since he didn’t complain. When the new build was nearly complete he brought out the torn boards from the old door frame and pieced them back together, strange faded black lines against the new painted walls. He had stayed on in that house after she left, after she moved on to a house of her own. Gwen had left her old bed there, but she had a feeling her dad had still slept on the couch anyway. She let him stay as long as she could, trying her best to manage his care besides her own household. After she moved him into the home he only lasted six months. But still, it had been a quiet peaceful time. 

   Gwen sighed again, a long forceful sound, powerful like the wind. She walked through the house for a last time, closing all the windows. Then she returned to the hallway and marked off the section of the door frame. It was the only thing she wanted to keep. She would have her husband return later with his tools to remove the boards. Gwen imagined he could bring them back and they would figure out a way to attach them to the doorframe in their hallway.