Evendays

For the last two days, two hard workers have been banging on the window frames of our house, removing the old windows. It’s harder than normal to get much work done.

The house was built in 1937 and still had the original, wood, double pane glass windows. I’m no fan of all that’s modern, but we had repainted them a couple of times, yet the south-side wood was rotting and all of them had eternal fog between the panes, so we decided to get new ones.

The above door-windows in our bedroom lead onto the balcony overlooking the yard. They are difficult to get used to because they close real easily. I had the habit of kicking the old ones closed. They weren’t mean kicks, mind you, you just had to keep on whacking the base of the window until it would finally clunk into position. Then you could admire the paint flecks floating to the ground.

I can tell this will be a tough tradition to break, and my grandchildren may be asking my children one day, “When you close those big, glass doors, why do you kick the bottom of them over and over.” And my kids will answer, “Well, that’s just the way your pappy did it, and that’s the way it’s always been done.”