Valentines Day Proves Pane in the Glass

Seen at left : the busted paneOn Valentines Day, I left two guys here for an hour while I went out to buy a special little supper for One of Them.

I was at the store when the One called.

“You may want to come  home now,” he said in his best this-is-no-big-deal-so-don't-over-react voice. “The cat broke a window in the study and you need to decide if you can work in a different room for the next six or eight weeks.” (“Wait, the cat?” I thought. "Wait, the STUDY? The room I spend all my time in, in every single day of my life?!"

The Second Guy was our carpenter friend Mel who was here fixing one of our old curved windows, whose upper and lower sashes don’t even meet anymore never mind lock, thanks to the Funhouse-style dip the whole house took at some point in its long life. He’s been spending six or seven hours per window around here lately, fitting precisely carved shims of wood into the frames to TRY making rectangles out of parallelograms.

And on this day he was in my study with one pane of glass out and leaning against the bookcase. But when he turned on his electrical drill, it startled our sleeping cat Abe so much he leapt a foot in the air and shot toward the door, knocking some books off the sofa arm and propelling them bang! like a couple of missiles straight into it.

I felt sad because it was such a great window with its wiggly glass that made the whole outside world look moist, and trembling - new-made almost.

I don’t know if Dave felt sad. He didn’t say he did but I recall how sad he was the time our three-year-old put a similar crack in one of these old windows just as was working so patiently to re-glaze it. He had to sit in a chair and stare into space for an hour to get past it. And I remember too how ten years later when we finally had enough money to replace that curved pane of glass it took eight long weeks for a new one to be made.

At least it was warm then.

It isn’t warm now. It’s freezing in here as I write her, and the noise of the street is drifting up through this hole-in-the-side-of-the-house where a window used to be - in spite of the plastic sheeting Mel taped over it:

The whole thing kinda took the shine off Valentines Day I think because in the end David didn’t want to drink wine with me and ate my nice little supper standing up at the kitchen counter.

I guess it didn’t matter. It was just a bunch of stuff from the Prepared Foods Aisle. And all I really wanted to do was go to bed and look up at the moon.  “It's a new day tomorrow!” I told myself.

And when the new day arrived and I put on a coat and came into this room I found it so filled with the smell of the outdoors that I could tell right away: with the snow melting pretty fast now something very nice is starting to happen with the soil: it’s coming back to life.

So I'm content really – and heck I still I have two other windows to look out of.