The Parable Of The Broken Doors

Anyone who's visited the Wool House in the last...embarrassable amount of months has surely noticed the falling apart doors.   Feeling a bit like a broken door myself, I hadn't made any effort to even take them down, much less hang the new ones that were just waiting for a coat of paint in the garage.

The blanket flowers and salvias out front had been blooming like crazy all fall and had done their part to distract attention from the doors and we'd all enjoyed them, none more than all the bees still gathering food to pack their larders for winter.  News of an upcoming hard freeze hit hard.  Especially as, if we could just get through two miserably cold nights, the temps were heading back up into the 60s again.

All the potted plants were moved inside; the orange tree carried in as well.  That job gets harder every year!  The greenhouse, with its falling apart roof panels (yes, it's a farm trend) was patched back together and the resident writing spider tucked in.  The plants in the ground...just covering them with a sheet was not going to do much good.

If it had just been a few flowers, I'd have accepted the inevitable.  It was a lot of flowers.  If I could just build a "greenhouse" over them... 

A couple of old lambing jug pens, an ancient rusty puppy exercise pen, some miscellaneous tomato supports, three beat up Wool House doors as a roof and some booth tent sides later...a little fairly large "greenhouse" covered everything in hopes that there might be enough residual ground warmth trapped to keep everyone safe.

And cold it got.  21 degrees and snow.

And two days later...

...the bees were back at work!  

I am sentimental to a fault (maybe/probably) and I hate to throw anything away because it's old or broken or just used up.  Those old doors didn't want to just get chucked into the back of a truck.  No one does.  And like the parable of the leaky bucket, without those broken doors, we'd have had no temporary greenhouse.

Two weeks later, the flowers are still blooming and the bees are still around.  The old doors are safely tucked into the barn.  The lamb and puppy pens are in frequent use here, but those doors are beyond repair and will be replaced in the spring.  The old doors can stay though, because I may well need their help again sometime.