Look Through My Window

The cabin's original windows with original silica glass (single-pane, and it's wavy) look like this, a little scarred, but it's been 80 years and only two are left and there's no greater fun than yanking them open in good weather, yanking hard and maybe even prying with a butter knife, and letting the breeze in to sweeten the room, and thought I'd show you the view in summer:

And just so you don't get too romantic about living in a 1930s log cabin in autumn during a rainstorm:

The leaking problem is largely solved by a piece of thick translucent plastic Demetrius stretched into a wooden frame he custom-built to fit this window from the outside, a homemade storm window, but in the summer I remove it. In autumn when the window leaks--as the weather and precip is increasingly driven in from the north--I set the shield back over the window. Then I must seal every crack in the inside with those rubbery strips of foam or else cold wind whistles through the warpings. Yet it's all worth it. These have to be the coolest, strangest windows on earth.

Yes, these windows should all be repaired and maintained, but the owners don't think the house is worth maintaining. That used to annoy me until I realized what I treasure isn't the INSIDE of the house but the hundred acres it sits on and all comes with it. In the Manhattan penthouse I will someday inhabit, I will never look back on my life and be sorry.

That Strange Phenomenon

It happens all the time in Missouri, not in very many other places, as if Missouri were the land of paradox and the fantastical. From 100 degrees Fahrenheit at 100 percent humidity to crippling far-below-zero Polar Vortex, even our seasons aren't predictable: they could be long, short, too early, too late to start, too cold, too wet; and the seasons have harbingers that are sometimes false (such as this year's cool August leading into hot days in early September) and sometimes true, such as hot weather beginning in early March for the record-setting sizzling summer of 2012.

Behold, then, the maker of rainbows: the sun shower. Many other nations call this phenomenon "The Wolf's Wedding" or some variation on that, such as "a witch is getting married," or "monkeys are getting married." That's according to Wikipedia. U.S. old-timers, reflecting the hard times they had to live in, are likely to say when it sun-showers, "The devil is beating his wife" -- and the rain equals her tears. Last evening we got a great sun-shower example (21 seconds) and no one was harmed.