The Storm Window Saga

A walk by the trash bin close to my place yielded this little gem this morning: old wood window panes.

My immediate thought: ahh, storm windows.

See, every spring when I was growing up in an old 1950s A-frame house, my Mom and Dad would engage in the Storm Window Ritual.

It entailed lugging a good 20 storm windows out of the garage, which had been stored there all winter, and cleaning them before putting them on the outside of each and every window in the house.

The Storm Window Ritual was one my sisters and I quickly learned to avoid partaking in when we grew old enough to understand what the saga of the storm windows was all about.

Mom and Dad would invariably end up fighting. Dad would get impatient with Mom, and Mom would get impatient with Dad for getting impatient with her.

But, seeing those windows, I became slightly nostalgic for not just the Storm Window Ritual, but also those old wood windows.

I wonder where such windows would have come from in apartment land, where I live at the moment?

Check out these three holes at the bottom of the window (the window is turned on its side here).

You flipped up that little lever to - wait for it - let the air in through the screen! So quaint! Hardly workable, though.

I have memories blowing smoke through the screens contained by old window frames such as these; I was a teen in my bedroom doing what teen invariably do ... blow smoke through windows.

But I also remember peering out them and seeing and hearing the huge trees across the road toss their treetops around in the wind at night before sleep ... so magical.

So amazing what a bunch of old windows in the trash can evoke.