At some point in the past, the singer Prince decided he wouldn’t have a name. He became known as “The artist formerly known as Prince.” How is that not a name? I thought a riff on it would be fun for the title of this post which features the door to our house in South Euclid, Ohio. (Eventually, Prince went back to being Prince. Good move.)
Although we didn’t know when we bought it, our house had historical significance. Here’s a short article about it and a photo of the house, a photo taken when we were actually living there. If you look on the left side of the entryway (as you look at it), that’s our windsock.
The house was designed by Charles Bacon Rowley and built in 1932 by the Ferro Corporation. It was the first of its kind in the world: a steel-framed house covered with dark brown porcelain enamel shingles. By the time we purchased it, there was siding over the shingles. The original windows were still there: single-pane casement windows that either wouldn’t open or wouldn’t completely close. We replaced them all, a rather large cost we didn’t expect when buying the house.
This is, however, a door challenge. All the doorways were extra-wide, which the movers loved, and our front door would never have been kicked in by the police! The rose bush was purchased for $1.99 at a store called Just Closeouts and grew into this giant, flower-covered beauty. Every year I had to cut it back, as it tended to head for the roof at a rapid rate and, for some reason, a few of the flowers were pink, rather than the deep red of the rest of them. This was our front door for 27 of the first 28 years of our marriage.
This, that and the other thing 