By Georgie Bright Kunkel

The dictionary defines a window as an opening in the wall of a building for admission of light and air. It is usually enclosed by casements or sashes containing transparent material such as glass and capable of being opened and shut. The small town home usually had a front veranda for sitting and saying hello to neighbors passing by. But big city life changed all that. Eventually people began sitting indoors with drapes in front of their windows. More and more people were less open to communication except in safe surroundings with close friends and relatives. And now it is not a wave from a porch, it is a text message or a note on Facebook such as “I like to pet my cat” answered by “I like that.”

Microsoft calls its operating system Windows. The word windows covers everything from windows in envelopes to windows of opportunity. There are stained glass windows in churches to showcase religious scenes. When I was in Maine visiting the family graveyard to find my Clark relatives I visited the ancient Universalist Church where my ancestors had paid for one of the stained glass windows and so their names appeared on it. Although the Universalist denomination had merged with the Unitarian denomination, I was told by a distant cousin that their church remained Universalist. Nothing like Maine independence.

` The Kunkel family brought west with them some old Missouri sayings. If someone was considered poor they were described as not having a pot to pee in or a window to throw it out of. When I read my winning essay on the Oprah Winfrey
Show in 1989 the producer had cut out this saying as she thought it might offend Missourians but she left in the story about my late husband’s ambulance driving during WWII when he was one of the liberators of Bergen Belsen Concentration Camp.

In my early years in my hometown of Chehalis there was a long seat in front of a row of windows where I could lie down and listen to the Saturday radio program from Carnegie Hall. After every Saturday listening to opera I could hum along with most operas including Carmen and Romeo and Juliet. But there are places without windows such as the museum in Washington D.C. containing startling scenes of that terrible period in history called the holocaust. Another windowless place was the thick walled root house where our family stored carrots and beets and barrels of pickles and eggs also kept in a barrel with a special preservative solution poured into it.

When I was attending college I had difficulty remembering what I read unless I read aloud and so it was tedious reading in the library where I could only mouth the words or whisper them. I relieved my eyes by looking up at the little stained glass inset in each window. Although I only dated once in college I heard about the professor who was upset about the young women parking with their fellows up on the hill behind the college. He would go up the hill and shine his flashlight into the car windows and send the couples packing. He was acting as birth control before birth control was readily available for young women.

Yes, windows open us to the world and may be covered to shield us from view or the drafty cold in winter and the heat of the sun in summer. Windows will never go out of style.

Georgie Bright Kunkel is a freelance writer who can be reached at gnkunkel@comcast.net or 206-935-8663.