Sunday, February 22, 2009

The Eyes Have It


The radio commercial said, "If, as they say, 'the eyes are the window to the soul', then your windows are the soul of your house!" I thought about that for a moment, then cried, "NO!!!! The saying should follow, 'then your windows are the eyes of your house.'" Obviously, the commercial was trying to sell me new windows. (Well, I'll have to write a letter about that!)

Jesus said, "If your eyes are good, your whole body will be full of light. But if your eyes are bad, your whole body will be full of darkness."

Our house has 56 windows. Most of them are original "six over one," double hung windows. Some of the double hungs are now "singles" (the cotton rope frayed and broken) which makes for not only a difficult time raising but also a noisy one. It's makes a characteristic yelping, like the screech of pain from your dog when you accidentally step on her hind foot. Some of the glass is wavy. All of them are leaky and inefficient. Never at any time have we had all of them clean at once. A few of them have never been cleaned from the outside (the ones on the back, three floors above the ground.) Forget hiring someone to do it. No professional will clean for less than $50 per window (not in our part of the world. anyway.) You can't hire some well intentioned, uninsured handy man to climb a 40 ft. ladder to reach the back of the house. We should replace them with modern, energy efficient ones, but to the tune of about $10,000, that's not going to happen any time soon.

So, the eyes of my house are dim. However, it's a soft light, not harsh or glaring. It adds to the various charms of our 114 year old home. You either love these old houses or you hate them. We love this one.

1 comment:

Spasticlizard said...

I love your old house too!