I remember my grandma talking about how she and her sisters would drag their feather pillows onto the sleeping porch and laugh themselves to sleep, as they watched the lightning bugs blink at one another like Morse code. You could hear the cicadas hum like a lullaby and the bark of some dog in the distance on the next farm over, she said.
How wild to think, now, in our age of blackout curtains and white noise machines, that all you needed were a little door, and a summer breeze.
Not Just Practical — Beautiful, Too
But here’s the rub: they didn’t just work smart, they looked good doing it. You know what I mean. Gingerbread trim so delicate it resembled lace. Fiddlehead fern-like wrought iron railings. Painted details in bold, contrasting colors that made every gable, every eave, feel like it was from a picture book.
Even that small gable door — frequently bordered with wooden scrollwork or protected by a dainty railing — was part of the spectacle. It wasn’t one of those stickers just slapped on as an afterthought. It belonged. Everything about those homes said, “Yeah, we care about how things look — and how they feel.”
It makes me a bit sad when I drive past an old house that’s had all that detail stripped off.” You know the ones. No more gingerbread, and the shutters were taken down and everything painted beige. I just wanna pull over and whisper, “Hey… I see you and I know what you used to be.”
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