And along the top, at Kelsie’s request, something new — Walt’s own words, in his own style of lettering.
BLACK FIRST, THEN THE WORLD.
Kelsie doesn’t paint our door in the dark anymore.
She doesn’t need to.
She comes over in the daylight now, through the front door, because somewhere in all of this she stopped being the neighbor and became something closer to family.
She has Sunday dinner with us most weeks.
She taught me how to grow the dogwood she planted, which I’d very nearly killed.
And when our daughter was born this past spring — the house’s first baby in over thirty years — Kelsie stood in the driveway while Lena lettered one more line under the wren.
A name.
Our daughter’s name, painted by the same tradition Walt started, held up by the black base he swore by.
I think about that a lot now.
How I spent three days furious at a vandal.
How I set up cameras in the dark to catch a criminal.
And how the person who pulled back that hood turned out to be a grieving widow trying, the only broken way she knew how, to keep her husband’s hands on this earth a little longer.
We thought someone was ruining our door.
Someone was trying to bring it back to life.
The garage door is black now, and gold, and bright with a wren and two sets of numbers and a child’s name.
Walt laid the dark down first, thirty years ago, so that all of it would have something to hold onto.
He was right.
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