Dreaming Through the Wavy Glass

I have a love affair with windows. I particularly love old windows. They don't have to be fancy. They don't have to be perfectly painted. I love traditional, paned windows with chippy paint. I love large windows that dominate a wall, with their sheets of sunlight that travel across the floor as the sun travels the sky. I love little windows - the kind that look as if they were an afterthought - that offer little slips of blue as you wind down an attic stair.

My love affair with windows probably started in my childhood. I watched the world through the hand-poured, wavy glass of my bedroom windows. The tall trees would wave and sway on the other side of that glass, budding and greening in the spring, their outstretched arms filling through the summer, shedding in showy pleasure in the fall only to ice over with delicate fingers in the cold of winter. I watched the birds fly far, far away in the sky or nest in the arms of those trees, while the chipmunks foraged in their roots - the slight distortion giving the scene an otherworldly quality. I'd lay in the floor under those windows, sunning myself on a pallet as I read book after book and dreamed of foreign lands. In many ways, my dreams began as I watched the world renew, grow and soar through those windows.

Today, I have a tiny baby boy. He's not very old, but he's got a Mama who's a dreamer - and who's not too bad a planner either. I saw a picture the other day that sparked an idea fanned into a flame by my love of windows. And now my head is full of dreams and designs for a tiny house of windows where I hope he, too, will learn to love windows, look at the world a little differently, and dream great dreams.

I'm starting young. Because if a Mama doesn't dream, how will her children ever learn to let their dreams take flight?