Posers

My family never used the front door, preferring the easy informality of the back of the house.  A visitor would turn in and drive along the fence, tires crunching over gravel, as the horses and cows kicked up their heels in the pasture.  There would be a slight bend in the drive—in the fence, too—and the visitor would find herself at the brick sidewalk we put in one year under my father’s supervision.  I say herself here because chances are, if the car was parked at the house, the visitor was a woman, come to see my mother.  If the visitor was a man, he would continue around the next bend and follow the driveway to the barn, where he would most certainly find my father making repairs to the farm equipment, occasionally grumbling beneath his breath.  The men visitors would pull in quick.  Leap from their trucks.  Get right down to business.  The women visitors, however would leisure their way up that brick sidewalk, pausing to admire my mother’s lush perennial gardens, before finally walking up the back stairs and entering the coolness of the house. 

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