The Carved Rosette Over the Doorway

It was cold and clear this morning, and by mid-afternoon warm enough that I opened the back door to let the house air out — October doing its usual two-seasons-in-one-day trick. I went out late for a small errand, a notebook and a couple of stamps from the cartoleria, and took my time coming back because the light was doing something worth watching.

The sun was low and coming straight down the street, the way it does in autumn when it’s already thinking about setting, and it caught the old doorway on the corner. There’s a wooden bracket over it, black with age, that I’ve walked under for years without ever once looking up. From the pavement it’s only a shape. But the light was at exactly the wrong-right angle, and there it was: a small rosette carved into the wood, worn nearly smooth, and what I’m almost sure are two initials. Somebody cut that by hand, for a house, for no audience at all, and it’s been up there the whole time.

I’d planned to spend the afternoon at the market, stocking up properly for the weekend, and then somewhere between one street and the next I changed my mind and came home instead. I’m glad I did. I sat with a glass of wine and a book I keep meaning to finish and did very little else. The small thought I’ve been carrying since: most of what we miss isn’t hidden, it just isn’t shown unless we ask. The same is true on the computer — a file whose name begins with a dot is invisible to a plain ls, and you have to type ls -a to see it. It was never a secret. Nobody had shown it to you, and you’d never asked.

Supper was bread, oil, and the end of a piece of cheese, eaten at the counter, which is fine when the afternoon was the real meal. The rosette is still on my mind. I’ll be looking up at more doorways, I think. It costs nothing, and the town is full of them.