Thought Picnic: Mansions, Rooms & Windows

Life as a mansion

Life is an amazing mansion with cellars and attics, back houses, stables, gardens and much else showing the wealth and status of the occupant.

The most important parts of the mansion that may not define status but are essential are the rooms and the windows, on the many floors that one will traverse by staircases; some grand, some steep, some spiral and others on the verge of making the climber levitate.

The halls and corridors leading to bed chambers or conveniences or those that cater for means of liveliness whilst there are forbidden places rarely troubled the haven of arachnids yet to be documented into a known genus.

Rooms as experiences

This mansion I have lived and retired in to have some doors open into rooms so stale that my opening the windows brings in a breath of fresh air, some doors have opened to other rooms that must be gutted harbouring garbage rivalling the muck of Aegean stables.

Other doors are locked shut and the keys are lost, in some cases locksmith have helped gain access to those rooms, in other areas of the mansion, they are hermetically sealed, no kicking will make the doors budge and those rooms remain a mystery.

All those one can deal with, you find alternative routes around the mansion and they least bother you if you can do what you need to do around the house.

Doors as opportunities

The worst times in this mansion have been when the door was opened, you could see right into the room and everything seemed welcoming enough to draw your gaze and your footsteps and just as you got to the door, it was slammed shut in your face and you know it was not the gust of the wind by reason of open windows.

At that point, you feel helpless, not like you will immediately turn the knob, but for a while you’ll be stood there trying to determine why, what, whether, where in wonderment that more represents shock.

Then you turn around as and find another room where there might be more pleasant company, it is impossible for every door in a mansion to suddenly have the mind of slamming shut in your face – time makes for the ebbing away of shocking memories, soon that old door will yield to your gentle opening and whoever slammed the door in your face might well have gone with the wind.

Windows as settling down

There are doors and many to open, the one that will not yield access to that room meant other rooms will get occupied and what about a new room in an unexplored part of the mansion – it just feels new and comfortable there – I’ll just open the window and let in some air, look, I have company; we’ll have tea.