Window Gazing

My step was lighter then.

After school, after I'd dropped my briefcase on my bedroom floor and laced up my tennis shoes, after some sort of dinner (often for one), I was out the door and up the long curved driveway that emptied onto Bower Hill Road. At the top of the hill, my walk turned into a jog, then a run, and I focused on the repetitive sidewalk squares as I pounded past the synagogue, the Catholic grade school, and the entrance to the community pool. About 30 minutes later, I’d turn back, this time at a slower pace, letting my muscles cool down. I walked leisurely past the single-family homes whose lawns butted up against the sidewalk. I took note of these homes every night, chronicling and charting changes and additions: the newly-cut grass, the half-cleared picnic table, the colorful whirligig spinning in the small garden. The homes nearest the crosswalk were simple brick ranches, mostly pale yellow brick, now and then interrupted by the roughness of deep red, three steps leading to their concrete porches, overhung by patterned aluminum awnings. As I got closer to my complex, the houses grew, expanding into two-story stone constructions. Poppies and purple puffs on long stems waved in flower gardens, and redwood planters barely contained tumbling blooms. A cool darkness was just starting to fall, and sugary yellow lights clicked on up and down the street.

 Oh, how I loved to look into the windows, drawn by the emanating light like an insect. I don’t remember the sum of what I saw, save for some white lace curtains, an abandoned game on a dining room table, and a set of rich maroon velvet chairs.  I longed to curl my back into the dark plush, to roll the dice and count off spaces, to own the view from inside the lace-trimmed windows, to be part of the circle within. The soft light cutting into the near darkness comforted me, beckoning. I usually stopped at the last house nearest my own crosswalk, a rambling Cape Cod sided in white with red trim, the entrance just off kilter a bit to the right of the sidewalk. The door was a red beacon, and I had to stop myself from touching the elaborate floral wreath encircling the engraved knocker. 

Now, so many years later, I still window gaze when I pass through a neighborhood at night, the windows again backlit with promise, though more elusive. Then, I could outrun life to grasp a little of the light in my palms, to roll it and form it into something of my own. I knew just a little about loss, but nothing at all about the deep wistfulness that would follow.

 

When Gary and I looked at each other across the sticky table at Cain's Saloon and decided to get married, I told him "our daughter will have your eyes."  He foretold the future (some of which has come true, but, boy-oh-boy, he shouldn't give up his day job). His sweet "we will" list included taking me to New England, to visit the homes of Twain and Hawthorne and Thoreau. (It's probably an English major thing, this desire to stand where they stood, to breathe whatever molecules remain, to collect their discarded words, to fold up their shadows in my notebook.)

Well, we went a lot of places, but New England wasn't at the top of the list. Hold on: I'm hitting the fast forward button.

We're driving from one rink to another for the Hockey Night in Boston tourney, our turquoise Astro van bumping over roads crossing through Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

"Stop!" I yell.

Whenever anyone says anything unexpected (let's make that just plain says anything) in our family, all six of us jump into the conversation with loose lips: 

"Are you sick?"
"I'm going to be late!"
"Quiet, kids, I can't hear your mother!"
"What's going on?"
"Why won't anyone tell me what's going on!"

"Gary! Pull over right now! It's Robert Frost's farm!"

And so it was. Quietly unassuming, with no gate or box office, Robert Frost's farm rose like a mirage in its white-boarded simplicity.

 

 

But we had promises to keep, so I stood rooted in the gravel at the side of the road and breathed him in. My children had spilled from the van, looked at the nondescript farm house, and then at me through skeptical eyes.

My own eyes were fixed on the upper window. the one whose wavy glass framed the room where Frost retreated every day to write.

"It's a house, Mom."

Apparently my children haven't inherited my window gazing gene.

The next year, we made it to Mark Twain's Hartford house, a curved, spinning kind of house tucked into trees (his neighbor was Harriet Beecher Stowe!),

 

where I wanted to slip a book off of his library shelves and make myself comfortable at his table with a cup of tea. Maybe he'd join me in spirit, if I did.

 

 

The docent looked a little nervous, so we retraced our steps to the visitor's center, where we had tea at the Murasaki Cafe.

 

Last year, Gary and I flew to Boston to watch our daughter, a senior at U.C. Davis, play lacrosse. "Well, I made a mistake," he said, "but I think it might be a good thing." It turns out that a miscalculation in dates gave us an extra day, which we spent in Concord, visiting the homes of Hawthorne, Alcott, and Thoreau.

 

 

 

"See, I keep my promises!"

Before we walked the Concord sidewalk leading to Orchard House, where Bronson Alcott trimmed bed legs to match the slope of a crooked floor, to Hawthorne's pink house, that he exited through the back door and climbed the hill so he wouldn't run into Bronson, to Emerson's white square home across the street, where the Transcendentalists gathered, we ate a fine and hearty lunch at the Colonial Inn (which was Hawthorne's grandaddy's home).

 

We sat by a window and feasted on puffy omelets and chicken pot pie.

 

I like to think that the rustic chicken pot pie (such tender chunks of chicken in thick cream sauce--the crust kneaded and stretched over the dish--bright green peas, carrot coins, and ridged slices of celery coating every spoonful) was also a comfort to Hawthorne's family who might have eaten here,
 

 

and that someone might be gazing wistfully into this window as she made her way home, after first running hard, then slowing to take in the sights.