Screen

You came from a country whose climate rendered screens a necessary part of any house: wire screens on windows, and on front and back doors, but also cupboards, although such things had become old-fashioned.

The sound of the metal frame of a wire screen door screeching against concrete has become lodged in your private sound world — that space which pre-dates the world in which you live now, which might well have never existed, for all the sense it makes here.

The window frame, the window itself made of wood and glass and rope, and the finely etched screen: these three elements worked in harmony to harvest a rain or dust storm as it passed through and around the house in the country. There was another house by the coast, and others, but they blend into one now.

This place where you exist does not care for the sorts of screen you grew up with. For six months of the year all windows here are closed. The spring is laden with pollen, and in summer the spiders cast endless lines of gossamer web into the atmosphere.

Bugs and insects emerge from who-knows-where to invade the trees and fields. And the houses. Grasshoppers, wasps, mosquitoes, flies, fluffy bumblebees.

You can’t understand the absence of screen doors and windows. Perhaps it’s because the season is so short, and intense. No-one seems prepared to block out even one small aspect of it. Your windowsills strewn with corpses of too-slow flies.

Only the grasshoppers are shooed out the screen-free window, as a gesture to your half-hearted Buddhist impulses, or else that former self.