Windowsills

Oh, no, I'm turning into my grandparents! Thanks to the wonders of Google Street View I can see the apartment building on East C Street where they lived in McCook, Nebraska. The building is still there, and looking just as unappealing as it did in the Sixties. The landlord's house is still next door with the brick fences we used to sit on to play cowboys on horses. There wasn't much to do inside the apartment except listen to Granddad's emphysemic coughing and Grandmother drumming her lilac painted fingernails on the dinette table. Once in awhile Granddad would let us rearrange the figures on the windowsill to amuse the people who walked on the sidewalk immediately beyond the glass. Not often, though, as it involved messing with uncooperative venetian blinds. He had a little old man sitting in a rocking chair, a little old woman in her own rocking chair, and a navajo hogan incense burner. Granddad would set the little old man and the little old woman together if he and Grandmother were getting along. If they were bickering Granddad put the figures at opposite ends of the sill. Like I said, there wasn't much to do. So now I've got these rabbits on the windowsill. They are not bickering, but some of them are singing a cappella. The snapshot I took when my grandparents visited us for Christmas 1964 is pretty scary, especially because I'd completely blocked those hideous dining room curtains from my memory with the bamboo blinds and that glass knickknack shelf above. 

© 2014 Nancy L. Ruder