Window Memories

By Jo Ann Wagner

Before air conditioning, on summer nights I’d lie with my head at the foot of my bed, facing the window. My room was on the second floor of our house and the heat in the attic continued to hold the heat in my room long after the sun went down. As I watched the moon come up through the trees, I listened to cicadas, crickets, and corn growing. I learned that crickets chirp faster when it’s hotter and slower when it’s cooler. When we’d had a lot of rain, frogs from the nearby creek serenaded me to sleep.

Every autumn as the winds grew colder, my father brought out his really tall ladder. My mother washed the storm windows we’d stored in a shed. Dad climbed up to every window to remove the screen and replace it with a clean storm window. The storm windows were necessary to keep us from freezing in our old house, built just after the turn of the century.

Every spring the process was reversed, except that the storm windows didn’t need to be washed. Eventually my parents replaced the outer screen and storm windows with a combination window that had a screen on the outside and a storm window on the inside. By opening the inside windows, we could push buttons on the combination window from inside the house, to move the storm window up to let air through the screen that remained. This was so much easier than having to replace windows twice a year.

Curtains hung inside our windows. In keeping with tradition, my mother washed these curtains once a year. Once they were washed, we dried them on the curtain stretcher. My mother’s curtain stretcher consisted of a wooden frame with pins around the edges that stuck out. It was easily adjusted to different sizes for different sized windows. When the curtain was wet, we pulled and stretched the curtain, hooking the edges over the pins. I didn’t like doing this, because all too often I’d prick my fingers in the process.

Once the curtain dried, it was much easier to push it off the pins from behind without endangering fingers.

Windows have certainly come a long way since I was young. Some modern windows flip so we can wash the outside from inside our home. I wonder if self-washing windows will be next.

Jo Ann Wagner is a contributing writer for Lincoln 55+ magazine.