Today, I want to hear about you.
What do you see from your window?
“All of us, at some point in our daily lives, find ourselves looking out a window. We pause in our work, tune out of a conversation, and turn toward the outside. Our eyes gaze, without seeing, at a landscape whose familiarity becomes the customary ground for distraction: the usual rooftops, familiar trees, a distant crane. The way of life for most of us in the twenty-first century means that we spend most of our time indoors, in an urban environment [or other], and our awareness of the outside world comes via, and thanks to, a framed glass hole in the wall.” Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views by Matteo Pericoli (preface by Lorin Stein.)
Write me a note about the view from your window (photos are welcome too) and send it HERE (or if you’re a subscriber, simply hit reply to this email.) I’ll publish your writing (along with your first name and location) in next week’s blog installment (5/12/22.)
I’ll get us started…
The cul-de-sac I see from my kitchen window still sleeps, even at 7:40 this Thursday morning. The view into the back yard, though—now that's another story. The trees, still mostly naked from winter, obscure little. Deer, nimble and silent, sashay through the trees, and I wonder what they thought the other day when our girls stretched themselves out on beach towels, winter skin finally exposed, on their terrain. Turkeys, fattened by suburban life, strut through the property now too, showing us we're the ones trespassing and not the other way around. At least the inside of the house belongs to us. Or does it? I sit on a sliver of couch while the dog sprawls her sleeping self over the rest of it, a hind leg thwapping me again and again as she dreams.
*Names in this blog have been changed to protect my family, neighbors, and friends in the neighborhood, and in a nod of appreciation to the beloved Swedish author Maj Lindman, I’ve renamed my three blondies Flicka, Ricka, and Dicka.