By Barbi Martin ——Bio and Archives--September 17, 2023
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You can just imagine what that meant to my life as a student, and you can imagine how my parents and my teachers felt about this obsession. I loved school and learning, but my best times and most precious thoughts always came while I was staring out a window. There are all sorts of windows, picture windows, kitchen windows, and bedroom windows. There are windows to our souls and windows to heaven. Sometimes it seems that the view from my home window is the place where I start to be aware of what is in my soul and my heart. It is as if I am looking at what is best through the glass and often to thoughts beyond just the physical. It draws me into conversations with my Lord.
When we moved here, we bought our house sight unseen. It was a leap of faith. We have watched house shows for years. When we see someone who now needs to “Love It or List It”, we think they were morons to have bought it without seeing it in the first place. In our case, financial and physical limitations kept us from being able to make a trip to find a home and then make another trip for the move. We had a small home in Oregon on a perfect property, with ducks, chickens, and pine trees. However, in that house, the southern exposure was on my bedroom wall which meant that wall got no relief from the heat. The western exposure caused the sun to beat down on our front room windows. We added blinds which meant we could not look out at our beautiful trees in the afternoon. I must say that the tall pines did make for shade on our roof which was a blessing!
I have read about this many times, but never having built my own home, you just get what is on the market. They say the perfectly built home will have an Eastern exposure for your bedrooms. It makes for sunny mornings to help you wake up. Let me take you on a tour of my home; not so you can see the inside, but so you can see from the inside. The home has a front door facing south towards the street. You come into the entry with the living room straight ahead which faces north and the backyard. Instead of going straight through to the front room, if you turn right off the entry, you will enter the kitchen which has a sink and a window facing the street. Past that is a kitchenette area with a large window also facing the street. I have moved so many times, and I often want what I don’t have.
I love seeing a home with a kitchen in the front. My, how I would enjoy that. You can watch people walking by and enjoy the rhythm of the neighborhood. Your front lawn is usually the nicest-looking lawn you have, nice for me to be able to look at. However, with a front kitchen, they can see you washing your dishes or coming out for coffee with curlers in your hair. Not that many of us wear curlers anymore, but you get the idea. I am in my robe at least, but still - it is not a pretty picture. The advantage you would have if the kitchen were at the back of the house is the privacy. “Look what the cat dragged out of bed” is never even a thought when you have a back-facing kitchen. The sun goes from the east across the front of my house on its trip into the afternoon. It never shines directly into my kitchen, so I don’t have a hot kitchen to worry about. It is sunny and cheerful. It would be an unpleasant place to cook if the kitchen was already hot from an afternoon baking sun. I have never enjoyed cooking when I have had to make dinner in a hot kitchen.
Our front room is on the north side of our house. Our front room never gets direct sunlight as the sun is crossing from the east to the west, so it does not take the scorching heat or make us uncomfortable. We have sunlight, but not directly aiming at us, nor bleaching out my good furniture. This is nice. Wonderfully large windows north-facing windows in the front room allow me to watch my dogs while they play in the backyard. Sometimes I can see little bunnies under the big tree. They are not in the fenced area with the dogs, but they are sitting just outside the fence. I think they are taunting the dogs as they show confidence that they can remain untouched. I have a maple tree out back. I have always loved maple trees and this one was planted here years ago just for me to enjoy. Kidding. It wasn’t just for me, but sometimes it feels that way. The front room windows allow me to watch the storms as they roll in from the north during the winter. Since they are so large, I am able to glimpse the setting sun on the northwest side. I can tell if it is an Orange Julius or a Tahitian Coral setting over the green of my trees. Personal Note: Green goes with everything! You never looked at a flower and told God that the stem does not go with that bloom.
On the west side of the house, it gets the entire afternoon sun and the hottest temperatures. That is the side that the garage is on. The shared wall between the garage and the house is my formal dining room which is next to the front room. What a buffer that garage is! Yes, it gets hot, but the wall in my house stays nice. As we looked around North Dakota for a home, I chose this house because it seemed like a better investment than the other properties, and it had a basement for my tornado phobia. We had a home inspection, of course. I did not realize how well-built and wonderful this home was until we actually moved in. This was truly a blessing from God and more than we had hoped for. We are so grateful!
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Out my kitchen window, there are tall, mature trees. They shade the green grass and cover our driveway and the front of the house. Not only do they keep the grass especially green, but we don’t have a driveway that sits in the heat baking our property. There are birds, butterflies, and leaves to let me watch the seasons change. When I was doing dishes, I was able to watch a robin make her nest on my front porch. I watched as her babies hatched and then poked their little beaks above the nest. I watched as they grew and flapped their wings so hard, I thought they would just fall right out of the nest. I watched the miracle of nature changing every day from my kitchen window. Those were precious moments.
This week there has been a large group of Monarch butterflies flitting around my big tree. I believe we are in their migration route. When I was a child in Southern California, there was a ravine up in the mountains near Clear Lake. An old log lay at the bottom of the ravine and it was absolutely covered in Monarch butterflies. They were like a delicate, orange carpet of living creatures. I have never forgotten that, but since then I have only seen Monarchs a few at a time as they flutter past me. So, to watch 8 to 10 of them flitting so playfully at my tree was a special treat. Do you realize how many times a day you are at your sink? I would have missed this grand show if it had not been for my front kitchen window and I am blessed.
My office window faces the street with a southern exposure. I spend a lot of time here. Sometimes it is so sunny that I do need to close the blinds because of the glare. As I sit and type, I enjoy looking out at the tree in front of this window, as the green leaves are happily dancing in the breeze. When you look up at the leaves, you notice the deep blue sky above. One of my favorite color combinations is Green Leaf with Blue Sky and a touch of Alabaster clouds scattered across the sky. (My crayon box would have these colors in it.) I am always reminded that God has a really big box of crayons! No earthly designer is that good! We are made in His image and we respond to His creation. We can appreciate and we can try to duplicate, but we will never have the artist's eye that my great God has. We can only adore the things He has already made and copy those things that we like. Like the Monarch, we can draw it, but we did not have the original thought. I am not an artist, but I think it must be wonderful to be able to capture beauty in that way. What a gift He has given to some people.
This house was custom-built and the owners put in really good windows. that are large, double-hung, and super-insulated. I guess living in North Dakota, the Land of Ice and Snow, these things are really a priority! Having moved many times and lived in many homes, we have been faced with window replacement and can truly appreciate the expense and decisions one goes through when replacing windows. Here, we are the last house in our tiny city. It is a stereotypical, really small town! To the east of us lies nothing but fields of alfalfa, then tree lines, then the beginning of cow farms. The cows are close enough to hear them in the evening but far enough away not to smell them. That’s how I like it. Trivia point here – For those who think Los Angeles was just a big mass of city living, the suburbs around LA had the smell of orange groves when the wind went one way, and the odor of dairy cows when it went the other way. That was in the 1950s. Of course, it is not like that now, but it used to be heaven. It is very much like that here. In this day and age, there are places to smell alfalfa or cows, depending on the breeze. It is like living in a Norman Rockwell town.
All the big windows are on the south and north sides of the house, but then, facing the fields of the eastern exposure, we have a tiny window in our bathroom. The only tiny window in our home. Of course, where do you do your most serious thinking? I’m not a morning person, and yet when I get up my first thought is to raise those blinds and look out over that field. That is my first priority of the day.
The fields of alfalfa grow as green as if you are looking at Ireland. The sun comes up from behind the row of trees past these fields. North Dakota does have wonderful sunrises and sunsets. It is flat and there is really nothing to break the view. In Oregon, the moon had to rise a certain distance to be able to see it over the tall pine trees. Here the sun rises or sets from the horizon and the brilliant show is across the horizon at 180 degrees! I have never seen it like that in a city or place that has more scenery, such as a hill, a mountain, or even a bump. We don’t even have bumps out here. Ha! But this flat earth does show off magnificent displays like a wide stage built in the country. The Hollywood Bowl cannot compete with this stage. The rising sun gives such sights in this little window that I would never have seen looking out the other windows. The morning sun reminds me of pictures where one is going out to feed the horses before breakfast. That cool morning air, sometimes with a bit of mist on the ground and maybe the steam coming out of the horse’s nostrils.
Soon the trees in the eastern distance will be turning color as autumn approaches. Mowed fields will leave their blanket of gold on the earth, and the sunlight will enhance it. Then comes the winter sun. That same field will be thick with snow and ice. As the snow drifts become bigger, the wind will cause the ice to start forming its own areas of design. Have you ever wondered how animation artists can make snow look so cold by adding blue, and how they even make the snow look like it has texture? In real life, the sun is glaring off the ice and it creates its own shadows where the depths have changed. It can reflect the golden rays of the sun across the frozen sheet. There are different shades of golden yellow and even orange from the sun as it bounces across this canvas. However, the temperatures are so low, especially here, that the sun does nothing to change it. Day to day it is the same picture and yet never the same. The sun is dancing across the ice like an artist’s brush. I am so amazed and my soul is touched by these daily shows. All this I get to enjoy just looking out of the tiny window facing east. I have a wonderful home with great features, but with all this, it is still my tiny bathroom window that is my favorite!
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