It’s been coming on for a long time. The creeping darkness, the constant cluttering. I’ve been slowly becoming more aware of the gathering gloom. It was time to take charge. It was time to clean those windows.
I’m no fan of any household chores, but the one I think I despise more than any is cleaning windows. It’s such a thankless job. You clean and rub and polish and then you walk away, only to glance back and see more smears. It’s like rolling a heavy stone to the top of a hill and then realizing that you let go of it too soon and it’s rolling back down! Frustrating, to say the least.
Because of all the aforementioned fun times, it is a fact that at my house the windows get pretty gloomy before I’m finally forced to do something. And this week, we reached that wonderful point where it was impossible to see enough to determine if it there was a mud smear on the window or if there was just a heavy, silent rain coming down!
So, on Saturday morning, I took a deep breath, trembled as I downed my coffee and said to my husband, “I think it’s time we clean the windows.”
“So soon?” he enquired, “It seems like we just did that…I don’t know exactly when, but I know it was the year Tracie graduated. When was that? Three years ago?”
“Ten years ago,” I said. “I’ll get the rags and soap, you bring the buckets and ladders.”
“The windows haven’t been washed in ten years?” he was horrified.
“Of course they have been washed…on the inside…some of them…a few times,” I muttered.
We started with the highest windows and I’ll give Roy his credit. He took the outside, clinging to a ladder in a progressively increasing wind and giving the outside a good scrub. Apparently those kind of heights make a person crabby, though, because when I kept pointing out spots that he had missed, he finally invited me to come out and do it myself. Given that incentive, I soon learned to regard the windows as perfectly fine!The upstairs windows were dirty, but they were nothing compared to the basement windows, which sit nearer the dirt on the ground. Taking them apart and cleaning them meant removing a few layers of mud and cleaning the sills of all the sifted-in dirt.
“Come on, aren’t you ready to put this window back together yet?” Roy, sensing the end of the task was near, grew impatient with my lack of speed.
“Just hold your horses, will you? I’m on an archeological dig here,” I told him, scooping up hands full of packed in dirt.
“An archeological dig? What do you mean?”
“I mean I digging in the dirt and the artifacts are plentiful,” I answered.
“Artifacts?” he stuck his head in the window, looking at the array of pennies, nails, combs, pencils, ect., that I had dug out.
“And not just artifacts,” I added. “Some of these bug bodies have been here long enough to qualify as mummies. I don’t know whether to throw them in the garbage or call a museum.”
We’re done with the windows now and the house is filled with clean, sparkling light. We’ve discovered that we have new neighbors and that some of our trees have grown up and there is actually a house behind ours now. It’s so nice to see out the windows again.
“So, when do you suppose we’ll have to do that again,” Roy asked as he relaxed in the living room next to the gleaming windows.
“I don’t know, how do you feel about doing it on Tracie’s 20th anniversary of graduating from high school?” I’ve never been an ambitious kind of person!
dropsinthewell 