The View from My Window

Iris I can see from my window

The view from the window above my desk is the same view from which I have observed the world since I was a child.  The row of lilac bushes I loved every spring is now a bed of iris, but the lilac bushes aren't far away, ...only a few steps to the west, where my mother transplanted them to form a patio created with concrete my father had salvaged from the adjacent farm he had bought.  The barn was torn down to raise crops instead of cows.  Over the years that salvaged concrete had served many needs, one of which was being piled into the frame for the front porch when my father replaced the wooden floor with a new concrete floor.  Did that stabilize the new concrete or just reduce the amount of new concrete needed?  We were a thrifty family, and we tried not to let anything go to waste.

Mother's thrift was primarily in the kitchen and at her sewing machine.  There was a canning jar in the refrigerator, and at the end of meals if there were leftover vegetables in the serving bowl, or even just a bit of juice, into that jar it went.  If somehow a piece of meat had been left on the platter, it went into the jar.  By the end of the week Mother would transform the odd collection of leftovers into soup or stew, although she might have needed to add a package of ground beef from the freezer.

She was a master at the sewing machine, and the prettiest prom dress I ever had was created from red taffeta lining from an old coat and curtain fabric for the kitchen windows that she had decided not to use.  I was mortified.  How could I go to a party dressed in curtains and coat lining!  It took old photographs to convince me that it really was the prettiest dress she ever made for me. 

Black swallow tail caterpillars devouring my garden 

But, back to the view from my window...  Today I see the foundation from the old hen house from my window, but once there truly was a hen house, and collecting the eggs and feeding the chickens was my job.  If I forgot to close the doors in the evening to keep varmints out at night, I had to go out after dark to close the doors.  Today it looks like a few steps, but when I was eight, in the darkness it looked like a mile.  The chicken house had been torn down when we came back to the farm, but I didn't want the old foundation removed.  Now that old foundation keeps the Bermuda grass out of the herb garden.  Consistent with my family training, I found a new purpose for something old.

At some time in my teen years, a daybed was put in the alcove of my window.  The wall to the right of the window was just wide enough for a peg board, and I faithfully arranged and rearranged photographs, invitations, cards and other odds and ends--things that had a special (if temporary) meaning to me.  I guess little has changed.  Today that wall holds my FHSU Alumni Achievement Award and the plaque recognizing my Georgia Author of the Year Award presented by the Council of Authors and Journalists.  I believe there is just the perfect place for the Notable Kansas Book Award for 'Prairie Bachelor.'  Old habits are hard to change.