The Draft Under the Kitchen Door

The cold arrived properly overnight, and with it the little draught that runs across the kitchen floor from under the back door — thin, constant, and cold on the ankles in a way that makes you stand with your feet together while the coffee brews. I’ve felt it every autumn for years and done nothing about it, the way you do with a thing that’s only annoying for ten seconds at a time. This morning I finally got tired of it and made a sausage of an old towel, stitched along one side, filled with rice, and stitched shut. It sits against the bottom of the door now and the floor is a different place. Rice, not sand, because when it gets damp I can tip it out, dry it in the sun, and put it back. Ten minutes, and I’ve been quietly pleased about it all day.

I’d meant to spend the afternoon in the kitchen shelling the basket of walnuts I’d been stepping around for a week, and then I remembered the seed of sense I keep forgetting: if a job is dull and the day is mild, take the job outside. So I carried the basket and a bowl out to the step where the wall puts the whole afternoon in shade, and shelled them there with the door open behind me. The walnuts took twice as long as they would have inside, and I didn’t mind at all. You crack them on the seam with the side of the hammer, gently, and the halves come out whole; hurry it and you get shattered kernels mixed with shell, and grit everywhere.

Which is the same lesson as the draught excluder, now that I think about it: both were small recurring annoyances that took one deliberate effort to end. I’ve been doing the same thing on the computer, where I kept typing out a long command with all its flags, every single time, like a woman who enjoys the exercise. An alias fixes it — alias ll='ls -la' makes a short name for a long command, and if you want it to survive closing the window you put the line at the end of ~/.zshrc and it’s there every morning after. Same as the rice sausage. Solve the small thing once and then stop thinking about it.

The neighbor came over at dusk with a bit of cheese, and we ate it on the step with bread while the shelled walnuts sat in their bowl, and she admired my door sausage as though I’d invented something. It’s cold out now and the kitchen floor is warm, and I think that’s enough of a day.