Temple Grandin: How the Girl Who Loved Cows Embraced Autism and Changed the World by Sy Montgomery & Temple Grandin

Author:Sy Montgomery & Temple Grandin [Montgomery, Sy & Grandin, Temple]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Juvenile Nonfiction, Biography & Autobiography, Women, Technology, Inventions, Animals, General, Careers, Girls & Women, Health & Daily Living, Diseases; Illnesses & Injuries, Lifestyles, Farm & Ranch Life, Science & Nature
ISBN: 9780547733937
Google: URYb-vK5WmYC
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2012-04-03T04:00:00+00:00

When a Door Opens

Temple was daydreaming one Sunday in chapel, a weekly feature of her life at Hampshire Country School. The minister droned on and on. The sermons were usually boring. But suddenly he caught Temple's attention when he rapped his knuckles sharply on the pulpit. “Knock,” the preacher said, “and He will answer. ‘I am the door: by me if any man enter in, he shall be saved.' Before each of you is a door opening to heaven. Open it and be saved”

The minister was quoting the New Testament book of John, chapter 10, verse 9, in which the door is a symbol for belief in Jesus. But Temple doesn't think in words or ideas. Because she thinks in pictures, she thought, somewhere she would find a door leading to salvation! But where?

She began to look everywhere for the door that would save her. Was it a closet door? The stable door? The door to the main farmhouse? None of these felt right.

Finally she found it. Walking back to her dorm room after dinner, she saw a ladder leaning against the farmhouse, where a small addition was being built. She climbed the ladder to the fourth floor. In the attic of the house, there it was: at the end of a little platform that extended out from the building was a small wooden door that opened onto the roof.

Stepping through that door onto the roof, Temple immediately felt flooded with relief and joy—the same joy, she says, that a cow or a horse feels when he has reached safety. “For me,” Temple wrote later, “finding holes and gaps is similar to the way a wary animal surveys new territory to make sure it has safe escape routes and passages, or crosses an open plain that may be full of predators ... and when I spot an opening, I get a rush of happy excitement. It is like an antipredator system deep in my brain was activated.”

But for Temple, finding that first door was especially momentous. Doors became important symbols for her, marking her many difficult passages and giving her the courage to go forward into new and unknown territory.

Passing through that attic door to the roof and standing beneath a nighttime canopy of stars, Temple felt she had found the door to heaven. It gave her courage she never thought she'd find. That night, she wrote in her diary, “I must conquer my fears and not let them block my way.”

The door gave Temple a way to think about her life after high school. “Because I think in pictures,” she explained, “I had to relate something in the future back to something concrete, something current. No picture, no thought.” Now Temple could picture her future—and envision the steps she'd need to take to attain it.

She passed through her special door many times in high school, whenever she needed confidence and renewal. When she went to college she found secret doors there, too. In a usually locked utility closet at

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