A View from the Window ~ Reposted from Dec. 16, 2006

When I was a child, our house consisted of four rooms with a closet between the two bedrooms, a sort of "heating hall" in the center of the house with nothing in it but a big kerosene heater, and a "bathroom" with no plumbing. Our shower and toilet facilities were built by my dad by hand, and they were outside. In the bathroom, we had a medicine cabinet built into the wall with a mirrored door. It had one of those little razor blade disposals where you just slide the old blade in sideways and one day you dump the lot of them. There was also an old table given to my sister by our next-door neighbor, Miss Hattie. In it, we kept scissors and a hairbrush and comb, any make-up any of us had, band-aids, and I remember in particular a little white jar of some type of greasy ointment that we children called "black doctor-doctor." I have no idea now what it might have been, but we used it on all manner of scratches, scrapes, and insect bites. Also in the bathroom was a sewing machine, and just above the sewing machine was a window. Mama kept the sewing machine closed when it wasn't in use, and many times we sat on it. We'd climb up to look out the window to wait for Daddy to come home (like clockwork, every day at 5:30), or to try to see if it was snowing yet when we thought the weather conditions were right for it. And sometimes, we could look out the window and see the big screen at the drive-in movie theater. In those days, the movies they showed were innocent enough. We couldn't hear the soundtrack, but being able to see the picture was fascinating for us, as we never went to the drive-in, close as it was to our house. Tall pines have long since grown up and obstructed the view, and the big screen is long gone, which is just as well, as there was a while when it became a place to show XXX movies. But by that time it was already a pretty seedy-looking joint. By 1969, the trees had already grown tall. That was the summer my parents added on to the house - two bathrooms with plumbing, a kitchen/dining area divided by a counter with a big double sink, a living room, and several closets. Where the window used to be, there's now a door joining the "old" part of the house with the "new." What used to be the kitchen and living room became bedrooms. Now they're full of relics of 57 years of life for a family of seven. The photo above shows the view from that bathroom window as it would be today, if the window were still there. So much has changed... but life goes on.