It’s been a while since I posted any window photos, though I have taken many. This one is in the house where I grew up, looking much the same now as it did then. We used to climb though the windows on the left and right to sun ourselves on the warm tar roof during cold April days. It was a sign of spring. The vantage point from which the photo was taken was where my mother kept her cedar chest, and I imagine it full of wool blankets and linen and lace wrapped in brown paper – to be honest I am not sure if that’s what was really in the chest or I am just channeling all of those Laura Ingalls Wilder books I read on that landing, my body wedged between the radiator and the window. But I do still have lace and linen wrapped in paper from that house, that much is certain, and I wonder now when I will ever have occasion to use them. They’ve been waiting for their moment for so long.
And I Woke Up Happy
Last night I dreamt that my husband and I lived in a white clapboard house on an urban industrial street. Its pale painted interior held many of our current belongings but we had no children and had spent much of the summer away from it. We returned home one dusk to find a circular hole in the glass of a the outer metal door, and then the wooden inner door’s top window had a similar hole in its glass. There had been a break in and I mused that we should have used light timers while we were away. We found the place cleaned out of all electronics and art and clothes and books and stuff. I was annoyed but mostly dispassionate, while my beloved set about the task of getting our stuff back. It turned out to be surprisingly easy. We drove a truck down the street to a gray corrugated tin warehouse. I don’t know how we got in but when we did there was everything that was missing, piled along the warehouse walls. We began to load everything in the truck, and as we did I noticed a small cherry wood jewelry box shaped like a tiny chest of drawers. It was just like one I had given him for our fifth anniversary many years ago, and I became convinced that, though empty, it was the same box. The box was stolen from our real house during a break-in in 1997, and here it was now, among the things taken in the dream. We hurried to finish loading before the thieves came back, and I climbed into the passenger seat with the box in my lap, so relieved to have it back and wondering if we would return to the white clapboard house or move on to another place.
LettersHead 