I SET MY ALARM

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I SET MY ALARM SO that I could get up early this morning. I had a pretty important date with The Yard Man (doubles as The Handyman, when he can be coerced into it). The activity that kept us busy this morning involved a stepladder, a dining room chair, two buckets of water and a couple hours' worth of elbow grease. It also involved nearly getting my pinkie fingers pinched off and frequent exclamations of the following type--It's your side that has the smudges! And--I certainly did wash that pane! (which caused one to conjure up a few ways to put the homonym into a sentence!)

This is an old house that we live in, Reader Dear.  In the event you have not been around long enough to have acquired this knowledge, anything that has graced the earth for a century or more (as has our dwelling) takes heaps of maintenance. Old houses get creaky and leaky. They require special equipment to help them cope. Which is why we have to go through the agonies of washing rope-pulley windows and their custom-made leak-protectors (ahem...storm windows, that would be).

Our painstaking job this morning went something like this: Remove window screen; raise two storm window panels to expose the lower window sash on both sides; lower both panels and the lower sash, to expose upper window sash on both sides; lower upper storm panel, raise lower sash and raise lower storm panel to expose upper storm panel on both sides; leave lower sash raised and raise upper storm panel--lower lower storm panel to expose on both sides...yep, worse than you thought, eh?  Can you imagine the coordination all of this takes?


All of these maneuverings allowed the one on the stepladder and the one on the dining room chair to each employ his or her own unique window-washing style--the one who whips out the washing cloth and wipes down the window with dispatch, then grabs the drying cloth and before you can say "fly-dirt on the window" is finished; and the finicky one who is laboriously scrubbing each little corner of the pane and before you can say "you missed a spot there," hears the sound of the ladder rattly-rattling off to the next window.



About mid-morning it felt as though we were scrubbing windows on the Empire State building!Window after window, there were always more. Eventually, however, we wrapped up the job, just in time for what remained of the morning sun to come sparkling through the old wavy glass with the assorted cracks and bubbles. It made me want to dance a jig. Of course, I estimated about fifteen minutes before the little critters that help to undo our work would start moving back into their favorite haunts, and the nitty-gritty of ordinary life would start sticking again. But...hey, Reader Dear, I had a brighter world for at least fifteen minutes...that's still something about which to kick up my heels!


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