The Delight of Open Windows
On that first night in May when it’s warm enough to keep the windows open, and the lily-of-the-valley blooms just outside the dining room where I sit with my pencil and crossword puzzle, I savor the balmy scented breeze after so many months with the windows closed. A month earlier, the rush of warm forced air from the furnace was a comfort; now the rustling of leaves and nocturnal creatures is a delight.
Our bedroom is on the other side of the house, in the northeast corner, where our neighbor’s lilacs lightly perfume the air in May, the mockorange in June. The east window invites a little too much sunlight before I’m ready to get up, even with the shade and curtain drawn, but the cheerful songs of cardinals, robins, and chickadees offer some compensation to this not-so-early riser. I lie there and listen until I’m ready to greet the day.
I once hung a birdhouse under a sheltered overhang near the bedroom window and enjoyed hearing the baby chickadees’ soft excited chirping whenever their parents returned with morsels in their beaks. But after the chickadees fledged, wrens moved in. If you are acquainted with their boisterous song, you will understand why I eventually moved the birdhouse to a spot a bit farther from the house.
We have a suet feeder hanging outside the kitchen windows. When a hairy woodpecker announces itself with a loud chirp and then pounds at the suet cake, I often stop what I’m doing to watch. The cats have a perch next to that window and used to crouch in excited anticipation when a bird came near, but over the years and several instances of banging their heads into the screen, they have become more nonchalant about avian visitors.
A few years ago, we had a big gray-and-white cat named Tres who loved to nap in open windows on warm, breezy summer days, belly pressed against the screen. His back was mostly gray and his belly was white, and our neighbor, seeing him only when he was lounging in the window, thought he was all white.
The flower baskets hanging outside the north-facing kitchen windows I mostly fill with impatiens and some trailing greenery. One summer, I hung a hummingbird feeder above the baskets (where the suet hangs this year) and discovered that hummingbirds also like impatiens. They would alternate between the feeder and the flowers at the window.
One afternoon, when Tres was lying in the kitchen window, his belly and the impatiens nearly touching through the screen, I heard the angry chittering of a hummingbird hovering close by. The cat seemed oblivious until he suddenly jerked back as though poked by something sharp. He jumped down soon after that and went off to resume his nap in another window. Whether the hummer actually poked him through the screen I couldn’t say, but it sure seemed that it was scolding the cat for daring to come so close to its food source.
When I have had trouble sleeping (a rather rare occurrence these days, I’m happy to say), lying awake with windows open has eased the experience. Trying to identify the sources of various insect and animal sounds is a pretty good way to banish the thoughts and worries that can run rampant on such occasions. And sometimes I’ll even pick up the distant call of a barred owl hunting in the wooded riverbank a quarter mile away.