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Illustration by Mary Kirkpatrick
I love looking in other people’s windows. There I said it. Cart me away if you will but hold on a sec’.
I do not stand on a ladder with binoculars. I look when I’m out for an evening drive or a stroll and everyone’s little lamps are lit against the darkness and you get a glimpse of the vignettes being lived out within. Or at least you get to see the decor.
My husband used to say that I was nosey as we’d drive down the nighttime streets with me exclaiming “Look! They’ve got the exact lamps we need!”
But it’s not about being nosey either. Maybe it’s more about an inexplicable need to suck up as much of life as possible. It’s just me wondering how other people live out their days. And their nights.
There is a house a couple of streets over from me whose inhabitants I would not recognize on the street but whom I find comforting for a reason unknown to me. I have viewed them in their large window as I zip past their house on a quick morning walk. They are settled in their wingback chairs, lamps aglow in the early mornings, reading their newspapers. And I think how lovely that peaceful scene is. Reading under lamplight brings to mind my own parents who did much the same thing for ages. So let’s just say it’s a nice little scene. Comforting.
In the evenings I see them, too.
“Good night Edna. Good night Harold,” I wish them as I scoot past. Their TV blinks against the dimmed lighting and they remain oblivious to passersby as they watch the screen.
My observations are not about me standing and staring, but what I’m looking at are quick flashes of states of being, of life! Isn’t that where George Orwell, Dorothy Sayers, Edith Wharton, Marcel Proust et al, gathered good material?
I often wonder if Edna and Harold recognize the treasure they’ve got there, together, in domestic quietude that we so often take for granted. I have no idea what their real names are, nor do I care. Maybe some day I’ll meet them and show them this column at which point they can decide if they love me for it … or not.
My daughter’s family lives in a colonial city 10 hour’s drive to the south of us. The red brick townhouses in Old Town with the white chinking between the bricks have gas lamps on the front walls that flicker all night long. They charm me no end.
“Let’s drive through Old Town tonight,” I say.
I look in the windows as we pass by and have the most riveting fun ever. Art. Bookcases. Draperies of the kind we seldom see now. I wonder who lives there? What goes on inside? And why do I care?
When I was a child of eight or nine years of age I sometimes helped my older brother deliver his nightly newspaper, The Galt Reporter. I still cringe at the remembrance of that spine-tingling squeak of the hard-packed snow underfoot. One of the things I remember most about those evenings is looking in the windows as we trod down the small streets at the intersection of Church and Vine. I was freezing and I was looking in at warmth. I was hungry and I was sure they had already tucked into their meatloaf and boiled carrots. I wanted to get out of the frosty air and into the comfort of home and they were already in it. My habit of window watching goes back a long way.
I rarely see people in these scenarios. It’s mostly just stuff. I love stuff. The paint colours amuse me. Why didn’t I think of red walls behind white bookcases? Or a backdrop of lime green floral wallpaper for black bookcases? I love my little diamond-paned windows in the small cottage in which I dwell but what about those huge world-embracing plate glass windows where all the world can do a drive-by and look in and see the dinner party you’re having to which you forgot to invite me? Looks such fun with your flickering candles and the tureen full of whatever it is you’re serving.
Many others have admitted to me this same wonky joy from looking upon the lives of others. It’s not their actual doings we’re checking out, but some connection to the human spirit. If I explain it to myself that way I can be forgiven because it sounds more like a philosophical position than creepy-neighbour-lady.
Tonight it was a candle burning in one window, a huge leafy plant like something from The Day Of The Triffids, in another a small white hysterical dog with his paws up on the sofa cushions in the window yapping and telling me to keep moving.
Judy Pollard Smith lives in Hamilton.