It’s raining today. I have the windows open, and it’s helping me remember the year I first really learned to love this living, breathing planet we call home.
In the mid-eighties, I was in college and living with my parents. We had moved from a shiny, modern apartment complex in a more urban area of Queens to a tall apartment tower with vast lawns and trees, half-surrounded by one of the city’s more naturalistic parks. Our first floor apartment felt almost like a garden cottage.
I had always been drawn to nature, but that spring, I was finding myself looking more and more outside my windows to the green, growing world outside. My room was small, but it was on the building’s northeast corner and had two enormous windows, one facing each direction. The rising sun would greet me in the mornings, and the reflected light of sunset would glance upon the rough bark of trees and the window-glass of distant apartments, turning them gold and orange and red.
I started walking outside more often that spring, especially on weekend mornings when the world was quiet and still, looking more closely at the trees and the migrating birds and the seasonal changes surrounding us. As spring turned into summer, I came to know the mighty oak trees as they leafed out, the willow-filled ravine, wild and alive with bird calls, the dragonflies flitting above the lake and the wood ducks making their hidden nest in the marshy corner behind the sheltering cattails.
As the weather turned balmy that spring, I had increasingly begun to keep the windows open, wider and longer, day and night. More than an ordinary seasonal adjustment, as I began to spend more and more time out of doors than I ever had before, blessed with the gift of nature all around me, I found myself less and less willing to close them, even in the pouring rain. The fresh green breath of summer grass and wind and rain blew into my room, and the moon rose mysterious above the nightly chorus as crickets and cicadas and summer singers less easy to identify filled the world with their buzzing, chirping, interweaving and interpenetrating songs.
Fall has always been my favorite season – I have never really done well in the heat and humidity of a New York city summer – and always I’ve looked longingly toward the first cool breath of autumn and the changing of the leaves. But it was different for me, a little, that summer, feeling for the first time a pang of loss at the passing of the summer singers, the deep nourishing green of summer; knowing that the time of the closing of the windows must come.
And I remember, as the cooler evenings came on that September, spending longer hours by the lake among the trees, returning home longing to keep that fresh, cold waking greenness and aliveness with me, and keeping the windows open full wide, as temperatures dropped into the seventies, then into the sixties, and then that inevitable evening in October when they fell into the fifties, and my mother could bear it no more and closed the windows, and my heart fell a little, feeling the city and light closing in around me within the warmth and cozy comfort of home.
I sit writing this now in a public space in my community, with two large windows facing east, and north, and the rain pouring down the screens just as it did in those last open-window evenings so many years ago. I live on the other side of the city now, but the neighborhood has much the same feel, and in fact, I actually live with more windows now: my own room is a converted porch, with five tall windows, facing east and south, and here too I am surrounded by trees, even right up close against the window, as I was then. And, also as I did then, I have been keeping the windows open wide, even into the chill of fall.
My porch is not within the envelope of the house, and while heated, it does not affect the thermostat, so I feel little guilt, leaving my housemates unaffected while I open the windows to my liking, sleeping in fresh, clear, cold air as if camping out. It feels like something is fulfilled in me now that never was before. I know at some point, probably as the fall approaches its first hard freeze, it will be too much for me and I will close the windows, leaving perhaps one small crack to let in a thin river of fresh air except on the bitterest winter nights. I will dream under the wheeling of the stars, as an old poem I cannot remember described it, dreaming the slow turning of this living, breathing planet, dreaming together with the old song of life on earth as I share that ancient living breath with my own, for, once opened, the windows can never truly again be closed.
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Wonderful! Thanks again for your inspiring words.
Thank you, your comments are always inspirational for me, too! 🙂