The Door, the Gnome & the Snake

YESTERDAY WAS ONE of those days filled with small chores.

We have visitors coming soon, and whenever guests are on their way you suddenly develop an eye for little things that need attention. It feels a bit like the days before Christmas.

Something else often happens at such times. It is as if the house itself notices the preparations and decides to present a few issues of its own. A thing that suddenly stops working. Something that demands attention right when you are already busy. This time it was particularly amusing.

The front door no longer wanted to close.

Well, technically it closed. It just refused to lock.

This happened shortly after we had a moment of brilliant foresight and mounted a small key safe in an inconspicuous niche in the outside wall, complete with a spare key inside. Guests do occasionally lose keys.

It was almost as if the door had woken up and shouted, “Excuse me!” As in: “Very nice, all those plans involving keys. But I’m still here too. Pay attention to me for a change.”

The fact that the door suddenly refused to lock struck me as rather remarkable.
We spent quite some time on it, wrestling the old screws out. As so often happens with old houses, the repair turned into something like a dental procedure.
“The screws are stripped and bent. They have to come out.”
“What screwdriver would you like, Doctor?” asked the assistant.
“None. This will be an extraction. Let’s remove all four wisdom teeth while we’re at it and be done with the whole business. Agreed, Mrs. Door?”
“Mmmmph. Goooood iddea, Docdor,” replied the patient.
“Excellent. Water-pump pliers and locking pliers, then.”
“The large locking pliers?”
“Yes, those. Thank you. Mrs. Door, open very wide, please. Wider. That’s perfect. This won’t take long. No anesthetic?”
“I’m a door. I don’t feel pain. Carry on.”
Within moments all four screws had been pulled and deposited neatly in the tray.

And then what? Suddenly we were no longer dentists but residents of our own house on Crete.
The reconstruction phase had begun.

Now came the puzzling, adjusting, and improvising. Small metal plates, little shims, bits and pieces inserted here and there—not the lock itself, but the strike plate in the door frame where the lock is supposed to engage.

Nothing worked.

At least, not at first. Then...
I don’t remember who said what exactly, but for some reason I started thinking about house spirits and gnomes. We had acquired some new Torx screws for the strike plate and were still running through possibilities at full speed when, quite suddenly, a feeling of calm arrived.

I heard myself say: “I think this may be something to do with the house spirit. Let me just put these screws in carefully and let’s see what happens.”
This was completely irrational, not to say mildly insane.
I followed my hands, the screws, and a vague intuition, while muttering something about elemental beings. And then?

The door locked smoothly. Problem solved.

“What happened?” Jacqueline asked.

“An elemental spirit,” I said gravely. “Or perhaps the new Torx screws and all the attention we gave it? Either way, it seems to have worked.”
We considered the matter.
“Really, we should leave out a saucer of milk,” I said. “That’s what one does for gnomes in fairy tales. The trouble is that the cats would immediately assume it was for them. Perhaps those two new screws are enough. Not because they’re doing anything special, but because they’re there, and because they’ve replaced the old stripped ones.”

Usually Jacqueline gives me a somewhat skeptical look when I talk like this, even though she is the one who routinely works minor miracles whenever wood is involved.
All right, this was perhaps more metal than wood.
But that wasn’t the point.
It was the feeling of the house gnome, and the decision to follow it.

“I think the gnome—or perhaps the spirit of the door itself—is called Tork,” I announced with some feigned authority. “I think he’s pleased with the screws.”
“Ah. Torx screws. TX,” said Jacqueline.
“Exactly. Now don’t get me wrong. I don’t understand it either. But this is simply why his name is Tork.”

Later that day, while we were sitting in the garden, we received another visitor.
In the late afternoon a snake suddenly appeared.
A quick, light-gray snake shot nervously past the legs of the garden table and disappeared in the direction of the street.

Naturally, it needed a name as well. In case it decides to join the little community that has formed around the house, alongside the cats Cathy and Tripity, who simply showed up one day and declared themselves members.

Whether the snake might be dangerous never really occurred to me. Perhaps it had been sleeping in the shade near the outdoor tap and we had disturbed it by sitting down nearby. Perhaps it simply decided it was time to find another spot.

The name is still fluctuating a little, especially the ending, but the beginning is fixed.
At the moment it is Samovila. Σαμοβήλα.

And so this morning I woke up in a house with a door inhabited by a gnome named Tork—or perhaps a door that is itself named Tork—and with household pet, no, garden creature number three:

Samovila.

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