Do you ever get a whiff of freshly mown grass on a summer’s night and all of a sudden you are 10 years old, barefoot on a creaky porch, chasing fireflies as if it were your profession? Perhaps you even remember peeking through tiny gable doors in the attic during those magical nights. Yeah, me too.So there’s this old house that I used to visit when I was a kid — my aunt’s house, actually. Large wraparound porch, painted shutters, a faint scent of lemon oil and something old I couldn’t identify. But the one thing that I always remembered was this tiny little door, say three and a half feet high, on the top floor of the house, kind of worked into the gable like it had a secret to tell. For a long time, I would look at it, then squint into the sun, and wonder what the point of it was. A door for elves? A secret hideout? (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t elves.)As it happens, those tiny gable doors in old houses weren’t there just for whimsy. They had an actual purpose. Who knew, right?
The Secret Life of Tiny Doors
Back in the day — as in, like, early 1900s-ish — before anyone ever invented central air (or, heck, even box fans), folks had to get a bit creative to cool off during the summer. That the houses were meant to breathe. Open a couple of windows, perhaps one of those tiny gable doors, and you’d have sweet cross ventilation that made life bearable as long as the mercury was high.
And sometimes, those doors were more than simply windows masquerading as doors. They enlarged to something known as a sleeping porch. Essentially, a teensy balcony or screened-in porch where you could pull a cot out and nap under the sky. Yep, you heard that right — people actually camped out. Voluntarily.
See the rest on the next page
For Complete Cooking STEPS Please Head On Over To Next Page Or Open button (>) and don’t forget to SHARE with your Facebook friends.
