Windows

When I was a girl, I was fascinated by passing windows. Riding in the passenger seat, looking in at golden hues of hurricane lamps between draperies, wondering about the lives lived within them. Glimpses of dining rooms and chandeliers, people coming and going to the table. Glimmers of lives caught in five-second passes out my own small window of a Mercury Sable.

When we’d drive into the city the number of windows in every building we passed was overwhelming. “Can you imagine how many people there are?!” I said routinely. And a window for them all. An imagination can take great strides in a second’s time. A dinner table, an argument, a shadow, a television. I would get lost in the story of that family, that kid, that home.

I once had a dream that I was in the back seat of a taxi, looking out the window at the buildings we passed. And suddenly everyone in the windows was looking back at me, staring. It was so unsettling that I’ve never forgotten it. That’s the risk you take in looking in a window, I suppose. That someone will be looking back.

I feel a vulnerability in having blinds open at night and close them as soon as the sun has set. I will never own a mountain home with window walls. That’s how horror movies begin. When I was a child, if my mother was washing the sidelight curtains, I would run past the door. The darkness, showing only a reflection of the houselights, would bring to mind flashes of newspaper headlines. Anything—or anyone—could be looking in.

More often, and more comfortingly, a radio playing and a window to look out of has been the gateway to most of my daydreams–being of the sort who daydreams nearly continuously. As I got older, passenger windows were replaced by windshields as I drove to clear my head. (Particularly in recent years with little ones in tow due for a nap.) The rolling hills of farms and manicured lawns of center-hall colonials birth new visions of old dreams.

At night running errands, I find myself still comforted in passing the warmth of house windows alight, awakening a familiar wistfulness that lingers until Spring. That gutting nostalgia that takes your breath away on a random Tuesday on your way to pick up bread. Looking out of windows will do that.

When you live in the same town you grew up in, every now and again you catch yourself seeking your younger shadows. Walking sidewalks or school halls with a Jansport slung over a shoulder, sitting in the old library, being dropped off at a dance in the gym. Are those familiar chorus voices? Is that weeping willow still there? Memories over years are like a carbon receipt with each subsequent page less clear, until it’s so faded you can’t make out the original.

Today as I was dropping off my kids, we passed the high school. “Look,” I said, “You can see the teenagers going to class. Look through the window.” Teenagers being the most interesting type of people to a second-grader and a preschooler. Adults are boring. But teenagers, they’ve got a hook in my kids. “How long until I’m a teenager?” “When I’m a teenager, can I drive a car like a man?” Like a man. There’s a thought that’ll bring you to tears and triumph at the same time. That baby cheeks should someday have whiskers on them. And the windows they stood on tip-toes to look out of–noting cardinals and squirrels, garbage trucks and seasons’ first snows–will be unoccupied in a few short years. I don’t remember the last time they ran to the window to see a garbage truck.

I don’t recall the last time I looked out my childhood bedroom window while it was still mine, before it became a room for grandchildren’s toys. I don’t remember the last time I stood in my driveway and boarded the school bus, finding my place by the window and daydreaming of school dances going my way.

And when this season passes, our windows won’t have smiley faces drawn on them or smudges from little noses pressed against the glass while searching for an airplane. Car windows will show me my memories with them: of trick-or-treating past the old cemetery, snow ball fights in my childhood yard, picking them up at the nursery school gate. Memories that won’t quit my body even after my mind has forgotten. But that’s what daydreams are for.