The story of The Green Door is a children’s story written by American author Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman, published in 1910. The story has been adapted into children’s stories, and the moral of this story is teaching children contentment and satisfaction.
The Green Door
Once there was a girl named Leticia. The girl lived in the same house where her grandmother and great-grandmother had lived before they died. Her parents died when she was very small, so she had come to this house to live with her aunt Peggy.
Her aunt Peggy was her grandmother’s sister. She was an old woman but very active and cheerful, a good companion to Leticia, who was very lucky because there were no other small girls of Leticia’s age in the village. For this reason, Leticia was very spoiled by her aunt.
However, Leticia was never satisfied with anything. She didn’t want to study or clean her room or help her old aunt with cooking. She even refused to read stories, and she wasn’t satisfied with the many dolls and toys her aunt had brought for her, or with the many beautiful clothes she had. She always wanted new clothes and more candy.
Leticia refused to do anything, but she was fond of only one thing: the small green door at the back of the house she lived in. Her aunt had forbidden her from opening it or passing through it at all.
But Leticia wanted very much to pass through this door because she believed that this door opened to a cheese cellar, and that her aunt stored cheese inside. She always smelled its scent, and Leticia would always stand before the green door with longing and eagerness.
Leticia noticed that there was a black keyhole in the door. She knew that her aunt Peggy had kept the door’s key in a very safe place and that she wouldn’t be able to reach it. Leticia tried to beg her aunt to open the door for her, but she would answer: “This door isn’t good for you, my dear.” Leticia tried to tempt her aunt’s servant to tell her where the key was, but the servant answered her: “There’s no door, my dear.”
This increased Leticia’s curiosity even more. She knew the door existed and wanted to enter to get the cheese. She even tried to look through the keyhole but didn’t see anything.
There was something else that puzzled Leticia. She saw the door from inside the house only, but when she went out and looked at the house from the fields, she didn’t see the green door.
One day when her aunt Peggy and the servant left the house, Leticia thought about the green door. She also thought about the wooden box lined with satin that her aunt kept in her upper drawer, and she wondered if the key was in this box.
Immediately, Leticia opened the box and got the key that was inside the box. She had no doubt that it was the key to the green door. She ran quickly toward the door and opened it, entering through it.
But when Leticia entered, she let out a scream of terror. She no longer saw any of the green fields that were behind the house, but was in the middle of a dark forest of very tall trees and bushes covered with snow.
Suddenly, Leticia heard strange voices, so she ran toward the green door to return to the house. But there was no small door. She ran to hide behind the trees, but a man appeared before her and said to her: “What are you doing here? This is a dangerous place. Come with me to the house.”
The frightened girl went with the man. She saw there a pale-faced woman and three girls, one the same age as her, and two a little younger than her. The old woman asked her: “Who are you, little girl?” She said to her: “My name is Leticia Hopkins.”
The woman was amazed and said to her: “This is my name.” The older girl screamed: “This is my name too.” In reality, this name was common in Leticia’s family. Leticia realized she was in her great-grandmother’s house and that he was the man who had saved her from among the trees.
The matter seemed impossible to the girl. Instead of entering the cheese room, she had entered the past, and she was with her large family. After a little while, the older woman ordered Leticia to go to sleep. She found herself in the same bed with the three girls. She wasn’t used to sharing with anyone in the bed, and because the bed was small, she had to sleep sideways, with her feet in the cold air.
Leticia couldn’t sleep until the fourth dawn, then fell into a nap. When she was pulled from the bed, her grandmother was saying: “Wake up, we don’t have lazy girls here.”
The grandmother gave her clothes made of rough wool and asked her to wear them. The frightened Leticia was forced to wear the rough clothes. When she went downstairs, everyone in the house was working. When breakfast food was placed, the girl didn’t eat because she didn’t like the food they had given her. Her grandfather ordered her strictly to eat the food, so she ate every bit of the food while afraid.
After breakfast, hard work began. She had to learn weaving with her grandmother and dyeing cloth and making those rough clothes they wore. She had to clean copper vessels, light the fire, and also learn history. Leticia worked from dawn until sunset, and her grandparents didn’t allow her to rest.
Despite the fact that she felt that her grandparents were kind and gentle people, she wanted to return to her home. One day, the grandmother took out a box and told her that she had inherited this box from her grandmother and began telling her the story of her ancestors. Leticia was afraid to tell them the story of the green door and that she hadn’t obeyed her aunt.
But when the grandmother told her story, she felt she had to tell her about the green door. The grandmother was amazed and told Leticia that they owned a green door outside the house in the north wall. Leticia asked shyly: “Is there a key to the green door?”
The grandmother opened her box and took out a key with a green ribbon, which was the same key she had taken from her aunt’s box. But her great-grandmother refused to give her the key and told her that her father had ordered her not to open the door and that she had to obey her father.
Leticia waited until the grandmother slept, then sneaked into the room, opened her grandmother’s box, and took the key. She then wore her previous clothes, sneaked outside, and ran until she reached the green door, opened it, and crossed to find herself in her aunt Peggy’s house.
Leticia closed the door forcefully, carried the key to its place in the satin-lined wooden box, then looked out the window. Her aunt Peggy and the old servant were just returning to the house.
Leticia decided to confess to her aunt about what she had done. Her aunt listened to her, and in the end told her that she hadn’t obeyed her but believed she had been punished enough. Leticia said to her aunt: “Everything I actually have is beautiful, and I’ll return to studying and help you with housework from today.”