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 a note about your physical view each day (photos are welcome too), and send it to me here (or if you’re a subscriber, simply hit reply to this email.) I will publish your writing (along with your first name and location) in next week’s blog installment.
I’ll get us started…
I shut out the world each night with two simple pieces of fabric. But when I open the curtains in the morning, I open them to the wild unpredictability of the city. I live among aging gingerbread houses; small bungalows dot the street. Like many of its neighbors, my little stucco was conceived at the tail end of World War I and born the next year.
It’s early spring now, and the hose—snaked around my front garden—is still in hibernation mode. Today a lone elementary-age kid inches by on the sidewalk, his backpack, like a turtle’s shell, dwarfs him. He bends down to pluck a long stick from my yard, and I hold my breath. What if he flips onto his shell and can’t right himself? But he manages to straighten up and taps his way down to the corner.
*Miss an installment of the blog? Or want to catch the story from the beginning? Visit http://www.tamarajorell.com/blog-entries-by-date
*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.