Windows

Sharalyn Coon

11/02/2022

Image description: a dark blue background surrounds a lighter blue window that has open shutters and shows white and purple circles that look mystical.

Windows let in daylight to relieve the darkness. They keep the rain and cold wind out of my home. A window lets in a breeze to dry the perspiration on my body when it heats from head to toe according to my mood. Breezes from a window remove stale odours that clog the house and fill the nose.

When I think of windows, I see myself again growing up beside the tall, door-shaped windows of a red brick commission house. The windows in that street were uniform like the houses they were built into and the structure of my family which was kept in check with my father’s leather belt. My most poignant memory from that time is when I was six and a half years old. I tiptoed toward a bassinet by the front door, beside my parents’ room, to peer in at the tiny bald head of my newborn sister on the day my mother brought her home.

I can’t remember the windows in the Catholic school I attended or those of the church on school grounds, although I am still drawn to the beauty of cathedral windows. I have read the work of Andy Connelly, a writer and former glass researcher, who mentions that the production of such windows in the Middle Ages, made from glass wrought by the most skilful of hands, began with an artist’s sketch dubbed the vidimus, meaning ‘we have seen’ in Latin, that was drawn on the whitened top of a table and later sketched to scale where the coloured glass could be laid and joined with lead. I sat, stood, and knelt in the pews of various sizeable and austere churches in my primary and secondary years, often waiting impatiently for a mass to be over, while the gorgeous windows, that made interesting colourful light patterns on the floor, obscured my view to the outside world.

I do remember waiting by the driver’s side window of an old yellow Ford dressed in ivory lace with my red-headed father who would ‘give me away’, only to have the marriage end seven years later, and I also remember watching him leave this world alongside the wide fixed window of his hospital room on Anzac Day. I find it ironic that my dad died on a national day of mourning. I tend to get overwhelmed at the best of times, so this is a day that I try to stay at home. This year my daughter attended a pool party arranged for the birthday of one of the boys from her school.

I sit on a plastic chair alongside a lengthy pool that emits a robust chlorine scent while behind me a huge wall of windows overlooks a neat urban car park, and I remind myself that gatherings are good. People have always done this. I even saw a video clip recently, from the Corning Museum of Glass, discussing the small round dome shaped windows in the first century bath houses of Pompeii and Herculaneum where people once gathered to swim just like they do at this pool.

‘Did you go to the dawn service?’ asks one of the Mums while our kids splash and shriek in the chlorinated water across from us.

I feel beads of perspiration underneath my eyes behind my glasses and I suspect it is not strictly due to the steamy heated swimming space.

‘Ah, no,’ I say.

I tell her some of the story. However, for me there is always a balancing act, a weighing up of how much of my story I should tell without causing others too much discomfort. I was married to a man who ran the two-up at the local RSL when my father died, and he left a few months later. I always wonder if I should speak of the fallout, of my shrinking family and circle of friends, but there are few who want to discuss childhood adversity and its resounding consequences. It can lead to anxiety, depression, complex PTSD, personality disorders, an increased risk of autoimmune disease, and more. I was unable to choose healthy friendships and relationships because I didn’t know what that looked like which could compound my already long list of problems and losses. Lost friends, lost relationships, lost hope. Eventually, I just stopped trying and raised my children on my own.

Not all my memories are sad though. I also remember holding tiny new humans in my arms, breathing in their sweet scent, beside different windows on the maternity ward in the same building where the three of us kissed our father goodbye.

Science fiction and fantasy novels were windows to adventure in my youth. I can still see McCaffrey’s dragon riders of Pern and the writhing and soaring bodies of the dragons as their flames engulfed the dreaded Thread. I followed Meg and Mrs Whatsit, Mrs Which and Mrs Who as they folded through time between the pages of L’Engle’s novel, and I was whisked from my loud and colourful home to journey with the mage Ged across Earthsea, in a novel by Ursula Le Guin, as we searched for the secrets of the shadow Ged had unwittingly set free. I still enjoy peering through such colourful windowpanes. However, now that I am not so young, I choose women authors who are forging their way into the male-dominated genres. They make me long to create a window or two of my own.

Windows are portals to the outside world. When I drive to my son’s house, I look through my Mazda windows, which absorb ultraviolet light, so my skin is rarely burnt while I’m on the road, and I see a wind farm. These towering turbine erections mar the landscape and propel my mind into the future, and I imagine two possibilities alongside the road from Ballarat to Skipton. One is of a rolling landscape with many more wind farms, and perhaps additional houses as Ballarat expands, and the other, an alternative burnt terrain with blackened trees in a dry, dusty, and barren landscape. I find myself conjuring the ‘whump whump’ sound of those massive blades as they slice through the air to transform wind into energy. Their motion reminds me of glass blowers swinging their long metal rods back and forth with a fiery mixture of sand, lime, and soda on the end. This wind farm, being just outside of Skipton, is not fully up and running yet, unlike the one in my imagination, and the turbine blades remain still. Like giant lookouts for the land, wind farms bring me hope for a better future.

The view from my son’s kitchen slider window is of a rolling green hill swathed in gum trees. He makes me coffee there and we talk about important things because I don’t know how to do small talk. This can make it difficult for others, especially family, to be around me. However, my son is somewhat forgiving. So is my sister even though I know it must cause her pain to see me wrestling with myself as I learn to grow and change.

‘I just want you to be happy,’ she says, but I don’t think healing is ever that easy.

I have walked alongside the trees behind my son’s house following the road to my mother’s tiny white weatherboard home, with its verdant gardens and immaculately trimmed lawns, where she would make me toast with tomato at the kitchen bench. I always wanted to crawl through a window at my mum’s neat and tidy house, but they all seemed to be locked up tight with the curtains firmly drawn. Mum was like iron, steely and uncompromising, but at the same time as fragile as fine untempered glass. I regret that any relationship we might have had with her was gradually whittled down and lost over time. It has been nearly three years since my sister and I have seen her, and much longer since any of us have spent time with my brother. He was the first to walk away.

When I look through the window in my lounge, I see the red, brown, and yellow leaves on a pin oak tree that gently move against the sky on this grey and wet day as I type. I don’t think about the glass I’m looking through which was once molten and swiftly cooled much like my temperament. I sit in a padded old armchair that’s curaçao blue with a pattern of swirls. The chair is stained and faded but inordinately comfortable. It is the place where I elevate my feet, drink coffee, and remove the elastic band from my hair. My daughter, who has just turned twelve and has grown in the last six months to a height where she can look me square in the eyes, gives me a lopsided grin as she passes me a cup of coffee. I lean back and drink, glancing through the slatted blind at the dying roses and their curling petals remind me of the passing of yet another spring.

There is a window by my bed. On day four of a flare, when I try to turn over to face it, in those obscure dark hours of the night, I feel the rodent of disease gnawing on the cartilage and bone in my shoulder and I long for relief. I contract and expand, like the window’s weathered timber frame, to ease my discomfort. In such moments it is hard to see beyond the darkness that seems to press against the window through the gaps in the blind although daylight always comes, and the ache eventually retreats. Whilst this type of pain happens rarely now, because I’m in clinical remission thanks to weekly biologic injections and oral medication, I can relate to Sonya Huber’s essay, ‘The Status of Pain’ and her experience of Rheumatoid Disease when she says, ‘people want to fix pain or convince themselves that it’s not that bad.’ I can say with absolute confidence that, in my experience, it is that bad. However, I also acknowledge, like Huber, that there is a lot more to me than my disease.

On lonely days when I walk alongside the Yarrowee River with my greyhound, I consider the homes of others and the barrier between us made of glass, weatherboards and brick and I think, who lives behind those windows and how do they see this world that we share?

The glass of windows made in seventeenth century England, says archaeologist David Dungworth, had a strong blue-green tint that affected light and image quality which suggests that the people of that period, and before, were unconcerned about seeing through their windows, unlike us. When deciding what to purchase at my local shopping centre I discover a multitude of tempting options behind polished glass. These windows are vast and fill the centre from floor to ceiling. They ooze wealth whispering promises to those who want to buy. The racks of colourful and glittering clothes are set out with buyers in mind. I used to shop with my oldest daughter quite a bit. She has a lovely face, but it is always set in hard lines and angles, like my mum’s, and for a long time I did not notice, or perhaps I just didn’t want to notice, until one day I did.

‘Let’s have a look in EB games Mum,’ my youngest daughter says.

‘Okay, but we won’t be buying anything.’

The two of us window shop and sometimes I wonder what these windows would look like to someone who could not afford their next meal.

Photographs are windows into the past that remind me of the people I know and the places I have been. I have placed those that make me smile on the mantle, where they sit like a row of sparkling teeth, and the rest are tucked away in the shadowy spaces of the spare room.

My son forwarded some photographs that were sent to him by an uncle on his father’s side. The images were taken maybe 25 years ago and, when I look, there on my phone are the tiny forms of my now adult children locked together in play, and a separate image of myself and their father staring out at me through the gel screen protector. I take a moment to investigate my smiling face, and the faces of my children from another time and place, and I want to return and raise them again whilst I am wide awake, and I wonder if that would make a difference before I put the phone down and return to my studies.

I enrolled in university several years ago, whilst hurtling toward my 50th summer, with Joni Mitchell’s ‘Big Yellow Taxi’ in mind. My tutorials often take place alongside the considerable windows that overlook the campus grounds. Initially, I expected to see large gatherings of students on debating teams all up in arms about current issues and I imagined them on platforms angrily squeezing their microphones whilst passionately addressing a crowd about their beliefs. I could still see the placards, headbands, and flares of the 1960’s and 70’s. Perhaps I’ve watched Dead Poet’s Society one too many times for the reality is much tamer. It was quiet on campus then, but it’s been like a ghost town recently with only a few wandering souls due to coronavirus taking its terrible toll. If I am honest though, I think that people continue to contribute to change, they just use the internet to do so, and some still take to the streets as well. In the last couple of years there have been more than a few protests to do with Black Lives that Matter, climate change, and more recently women’s demonstrations against a culture that often supports sexual assault.  

I am reminded of what it is to be human by the personal essays of various writers that are windows into creative minds and hearts. In her essay ‘Three Spheres,’ psychologist Lauren Slater writes about returning to a facility where she was once treated for borderline personality disorder to assist a patient with the same diagnosis. You can see the way in which she has struggled with being open about her past, not wanting to contribute to a culture of narcissism and questioning her decision to reveal herself. Slater’s work resonates with me, and I find it especially poignant when she points out that, ‘wounds are never confined to a single skin but reach out to rasp us all.’ I recognise my own experiences in such words feeling that I have both rasped against others and too often keenly felt their hurts desiring to carry their burdens when it was not always wise to do so.

Thus, I have looked through windows while waiting for loved ones to arrive, and I have tried to clean the windows of others without truly addressing the state of my own, until I learned that windows are framed.

Now I take care of mine a little better. I remind myself that I am only responsible for the windows of two, and I try not to dominate my child’s frame. After all, we all have our own windows that are individually constructed to offer a unique, and sometimes scenic, view.

Sharalyn Coon lives in Ballarat within a stone’s throw, or two, of the Yarrowee River with her daughter Lilli and charming greyhound Clyde. She was a nurse for twenty years, but as a long-term avid reader of other writer’s stories she has finally decided to write and share a few of her own.