[This is a slightly edited version of a column that originally appeared in the Downhomer Magazine, vol 11: 4 (September 1998), pp. 26-27.]

Visitors to the province wonder about those doorways that seemingly float on the front of some houses.  One tourist asked me this year why "many of your homes don't have steps and a porch leading up to the front door."  They hang there, six or eight feet from the ground.  Stepless.  Someone recently told me her family called them "back-snappers" -- step through the door and you break your back.

I grew up in St John's where such doors were almost unheard of or, rather, unseen..  But a Sunday afternoon drive to any of the  neighbouring rural communities was all you needed to see them.  It was a townie joke about the baymen that these were "mother-in-law doors."

This is typical urban hilarity about rural folk, that they are not as sophisticated as ourselves.  The stepless door was supposed to be the rural man-of-the-house's defense against his wife's mother:  when he tired of her visit, he would direct her to the front door.  It is pretty coarse humour, but part of the folklore of these doors.  The name has nothing to do with the real historical reasons for their existence.   And jocular as it may be, it reflects a mild but still nasty anti-rural bias by us townies.  Not to mention the sexist undertones of traditional jokes about mothers-in-law.  The real explanation of the stepless doors lies elsewhere.

In the history of houses in most of Newfoundland, certain patterns emerge.  Traditionally, for example, there was no living room in most outport Newfoundland homes, at least not as most North Americans understand the living room -- a room where the family retires after a meal, spends an evening in entertainment, and where visitors are seated.

Instead, the kitchen was the centre of activity throughout the waking hours -- where you cooked, ate, and entertained visitors.  The kitchen mightalso be a workspace for the kinds of daily work that could continue right through to bedtime -- repairing boots, hooking rugs, and so on -- work that could involve all the members of the family, adult and child.

The small, modern kitchen, a kind of one-person work-station, is not the sort of room the old-fashioned kitchen was.  In many Newfoundland homes the kitchen was -- and still is -- certainly the largest room of the house.  It was used far more often than the other rooms.

Because of this focus on the kitchen, many traditional homes had fairly strict (though usually unstated) rules about what parts of the house were private.  Two or three generations ago, a visitor to most outport homes would not even walk through the house to use the toilet -- there was no indoor plumbing so they went outside to the privy.  Generally speaking, what was beyond the kitchen was private space.

There was one exception to this privacy but only in exceptional times. This was the parlour, a room at the "front" of the house.  A visiting minister or priest might be entertained in the parlour, and a family member might be waked there before a funeral.  Parlours were rarely used except in such circumstances.  It is commonly said that in most Newfoundland communities, when someone knocks at the "front" door, everyone knows it is a stranger.  Anyone they knew would have naturally come to the kitchen door.

Together, all of this means that the "back" door (that is, the door off the kitchen) was the only important door to the house. Any other door was only an emergency escape during the night, or even just a formal addition to the house for stylistic purposes.

The merely stylistic door at the front of the house was not an issue with older styles of houses, ones built without deep basements.  Without a basement, that unused front door was still more or less flush with the ground.  But in the past fifty years or so, people have built houses with basements.  The soil is not always so easy to dig into that the basement can be entirely underground, so the sill, and accordingly the main floor, is often found at some height up from the ground -- five feet or more.  Thus the beginnings of these stepless doors.

Just because a family has built a modern CMHC bungalow, it does not follow that their patterns of use will necessarily change within the house.  Stepless front doors are a stylistic holdover from floorplans like thegovernment-issued ones.  But people continue to this day to use the back entrance of most homes and their kitchens remain the focus of activity in their house.  Owners often say they will one day get around to building steps to their front door, but only after more important renovations are made.

In the 1990s some of these stepless doors have been completed with porches and decks.  The Moratorium in the inshore fishery has given many home owners the free time to finish small things they put off for years -- like building front steps.  Stepless doors have become rare in some communities now.  But of course, it is a matter of community standards, and other places have just as many as before.