Wrought Iron Remembered

I met this gate when I was four or five on visits to my paternal Grandmother’s house in Sümeg, Hungary.  My long-standing love affair with wrought iron therefore goes deeply back into the past. I’ve wondered many times how that place might look—whether the house, the gate still stood. Now thanks to the excellent photographic efforts of sister-in-law Peggy Jenkins Darnay, here is how the place looked in late summer of 2012. The gate is still there, standing guard. In my day the courtyard beyond it was wider, extending about the same distance to the left, where a stone wall stands. The current owners have cultivated parts of it and laid down a stone walk. The house looks repainted—but the same color—and the stone has been whitened by blasting with sand. In midst of change, some permanence…