the threshold stone

sandstone · 1847 · letterer j. hartwick

the stone is one step below floor level on the outer side and flush with the boards on the inner — it is the line itself. the twelfth of june, eighteen forty-seven; two sets of initials, his and hers. it is the date of the house's first occupation.

his marriage of nine months had been a long one in the way most marriages are; her name does not appear in the parish books, only here, paired with his. the custodian is not certain who she was. the stone is. the stone is not telling.

a hundred and seventy-nine years of shoes have made a dish of the centre, the kind a bird could drink from. the letters survived in the rim, where they could not be polished off. it is not a threshold any more, exactly — it is a remembering, that you cross.

field-note · step on it lightly. you are someone's footstep, but not the first.