Sing it to the tune of “Let the Sunshine In”, the second half (or whatever you want to call it) of “The Age of Aquarius” by the Fifth Dimension. We have two doors to the outside at the moomincabin. Neither one of them is ever blocked from entry/exit. Blocking perfunctional perfectly functional doors to the outside always just grates on my sense of feng shui or whatever it is. Why? (And yes, it is dangerous to block an exit to the outside but that’s not the point of this already wildly rambling post.)

Anyway, if I haven’t totally lost you, I am talking about the moomincabin doors. The doors are vintage 1960 and the design is ingenious for a summer cabin of that vintage, the operable word being “summer”. There are two interchangeable panels associated with each door. One holds panes of glass and the other is a screen. A simple screwdriver unscrews four screws to remove whatever panel is currently in the door and then screws the new panel into the door.

We won’t go into the polly-tickle intricacies that determine when to change from the glass panels to the screens. It’s complicated and changes rapidly according to the ever-changing weather conditions on the shores of Gitchee Gumee. But usually, the glass panels go in at night. It has to be reeeeeallly hot and sweaty and a stable weather pattern to boot for us to leave the screens in overnight. Anything can happen overnight. Gale force winds? Yes.

Alert! Alert! Breaking! It is pitch black outside and I can hear thunder in the distance. Are we going to get rain? No.

In his later years, my old coot became ultra concerned about who handled the moomincabin doors. People who were, uh, 50 or so and had been dealing with the doors with aplomb since they were teenagers had to kind of sneak around to change them out. And there was that one steamy hot night that he reacted to my suggestion to leave the screens in overnight with, “Well, bears will get in.” Uh, what? I mean, there are bears in that neighborhood but I have NEVER seen one in person (knock on wood because others have). I think we did put the glass doors in that night. Apparently he was reacting to an incident downriver on Sugar Island where a bear did enter a cabin through a screen door. Yes, it could happen.

So here in the southeast area of the Great Lake State, it is pretty dern hot and we are wishing for rain, as Louie-Louiiii says, to clean the air. Last night, I closed and locked the front door and then I slept on a couch in the back A-ddition of the Landfill. I left both doorwalls open with the screens in. I had a relatively restless night on one of the couches back there and then, for a variety of reasons too complicated to describe, I woke up a half hour later than I usually do on a work day. It was okay. I scrambled myself together PDQ. The important thing is that no bears came in those doors. Of course, we don’t have bears around here… Deer, yes, yes yes…

So here is the video I was talking about at the beginning of this rambling blahg of blather. Hope there’s no ad but you know the drill.

Only a wee bit of rain here in the end… Hoping for more. We need it. But of all things, it is a wee bit cooler…

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