Regarding Storm Doors

I don't mind winter.

I prefer summer, sure, which is no one's fault if not my sister's, who has convinced me to thrive on flatness and heat and in-and-out forehands, but winter is okay - I don't mind winter. I like snow, and I can deal with the cold. Even the early darkness has its upside: when it's dark I get down to work, so the earlier the sun sets the earlier I start the notes I have due for U.S. the next day.

I have one qualm with winter, though, and it's not even a big one. It's a pet peeve, really, and one that is quite low on the list, resting well below stubbing my toe and only just above people who don't pause for rests while singing.

I hate storm doors.

Just as my love for all things disk-shaped, I get this one at least partly from my sister too; when she was nine my dad was replacing the storm door window with the screen and she didn't know. She pushed down on the door's handle with her right hand and pressed her left against the space where recently there had been glass and so she plunged, head-first, through the frame and came crashing down a million feet below on our concrete stoop, taking only a brief rest-stop during the trip to shatter through the plate glass that my dad had rested on the ground.

(My sister, incidentally, has a bit of a feud with doors in general. The morning before her last day of middle school I watched as she punched through the glass on our side door.)

My own problems with storm doors began when our house was robbed in sixth grade. I came home from the bus one afternoon in February to discover the front door smashed into a thousand pieces but the storm door intact, waiting for me, as if saying, with a big old grin, your house was broken into, but don't worry, I'm fine, I'm still here, I didn't break. I was understandably upset about it. Our front door had sacrificed itself in the name of the defense of our house, had fought bravely as an unnamed man in a black turtleneck split the wood at the dead bolt and splintered the hinges into dust, and our storm door had sat there, watching its companion being slaughtered, and quaked in fear and hoped it would be spared.

Storm doors remain a nuisance. I can't shut the exterior doors of my house anymore because of the cushion of air in between the storm door and the door I'm shutting. The satisfying slam created in the presence of a screen is gone, replaced with a frustratingly gentle wfff of air coupled with the light tap the edge of the door makes as it hits the frame without nearly enough force to move it any farther. I have to press up against the door to shut it, a necessity that drives me crazy beyond belief. And while storm doors make it nearly impossible to shut a door with any sort of force, they also make it completely pointless to open a door; there is no purpose in having an exterior door open if the storm door remains closed, so on an unusually warm day in December our doors are shut even though I want to invite the weather inside and ask it if it wants a soda or something. I could drink a soda with winter, I think - I don't much mind winter. It's storm doors I can't stand.