The Threshold

There are times when I grow impatient of our threshold, it is so new, and consequently so expressionless.  Under the green door, wide to admit whatever may come of life, it waits, hospitable and expectant, but it is as yet, unworn….I like to watch, too, people at their doorways….From all the walks and ways of life what knowledge have these folk brought home; word, or look, or gesture may perhaps bring some fragment of their hard-won wisdom to me as I pass….I think….of the significance of the threshold.  To all of us, human, or bird, or beast, it means refuge; it has thus a sanctity that nothing else in the wide world possesses.  It brings the joy of the familiar, the settled, to relieve the haunting sense of endless quest.  That enduring trust in home, one of the deepest things in human nature, is magnificent in this universe of constant flux and devastating change.  “It is more strong than death, being strong as love.”

-       Margaret Sherwood[1]

From “Familiar Ways”[2]

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[1] Margaret Pollock Sherwood was an educator and author.  She was born in Ballston, New York in 1864, the daughter of Thomas and Mary Beattie Sherwood. She graduated from Vassar College in 1886 and began teaching college in 1889. Margaret completed a Ph. D. at Yale in 1898; her dissertation covered the dramatic theory and practice of John Dryden (see footnote 138). Afterward, she became a professor of English Literature at Wellesley College. She was a frequent contributor to magazines, and wrote several books. Margaret did not marry. She died in 1955.  (Source: Who’s Who in America, 1903-1905) 

[2] This book was first printed in 1917, the timeline of Clare’s book has at least reached that point.