Inspired by an Image – Windows

The assignment for day 4 of the Writing101 class which I took recently was to take one image and be inspired by it and then write about it.

At first, I was not moved by any of the ones that were offered (and spent way too much time being amazed at many others on the site that was linked to in the assignment) and I was busy otherwise, so I postponed this one.

Later, I went back and looked again at the images offered and the one of the window struck me on two levels.

Attic Window

When I was a child, we would travel from wherever we were living to visit my grandparents in Rector, Arkansas, which is in Clay County in the northeast corner of Arkansas. They had a house that was rather small for them having raised as many kids in it as they had and, it being on a large (to my city eyes) farm, I don’t suppose they had down-sized after the kids were grown. I recall that they had an outhouse that we used sometimes and it made me glad for indoor plumbing, a fig tree that grew beside the house and that led to my grandmother Mary making interesting dishes with figs, and an attic where we sometimes slept. The window in this picture is very similar to what I recall of the one in that attic. As we got older and visited when there weren’t so many other relatives who needed to bed down there, we moved from the attic into a bedroom. You never knew when you went upstairs if there would be spiders or other unpleasant things to deal with, so I was happy to move out of the attic. After my granddad passed away, my grandmother sold the house and farm and moved to another city where she could be close to one of her daughters. My aunt apparently took good care of her, as she seemed happy when I visited her there in her one-story house with no attic.

Windows Seen during Inspections

From about 2007 to 2014, I had a sideline business as a Field Inspector. I focused on commercial property inspections, so I visited and inspected a large number of apartment complexes, along with retail shopping centers, restaurants, warehouses, and office buildings. As I have always enjoyed taking pictures, this was a pretty good sideline. It combined photography with travel, and, although I eventually limited my travel to the immediate area, at one time, I was going to Little Rock and Hot Springs and other cities in Arkansas; to Oxford and Hernando and other cities in Mississippi; and as far away as Jackson in Tennessee. In each of those cities, I climbed stairs and looked at upper-floor apartments. Often times, I would find that there were what amounted to windows in the stairwells. Some of those gave lovely views of the grounds and the windows added a nice frame around the photos. One of these days, I should make time to pull some of those photos together and make a picture book of them, along with some of the rooftop pictures I was able to take from the tops of tall buildings. I don’t do field inspections these days, as it got to be too much hassle for too little pay. I will always remember some of the properties that I visited for the way they lavished attention on their appearance.

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