A proper pleasure

Every summer on Wagner Street in Warren, Michigan, my sisters and I would call on our neighbor friends to play. We’d stand at the front or side door, whichever the mother of the house determined, and sang our playmate’s name.

Since my family usually included a beloved dog, Mom and Dad had a fence installed soon after we moved into our little ranch house. That meant our callers used the front door.

A new subdivision with over thirty children on our side of the block alone, the plethora of names we sang sometimes return when I least expect it.

The Zablocki children, for instance. Kathy. Gail. Johnny. The first neighbor children I babysat for fifty cents an hour.

Now, the Zablocki siblings were too young for me to call at their door to play. Shelly, two doors down, came close to my age. Her older brother Marty was in my class at Wolcott Elementary School, yet it was not proper for a girl to call for a boy at his house.

This practice of calling for playmates often created fingerprints on the storm door window. Sometimes slobber.

Eventually, Mom retrieved her Windex bottle from under the kitchen sink, grabbed a towel, and cleaned the window.

This came to mind last night when I tidied the garage and spied the two sorely neglected garage windows. Dead bugs, cobwebs, dirt from the road.

I’ve never hung curtains on the windows, and decided it’s time to do so. Make the garage a more hospitable place.

So, I retrieved my Windex bottle from under the kitchen sink, just like Mom did. However, my bottle of Windex claims “kills 99.9% of germs” and “MULTISURACE DISINFECTANT CLEANER” with a “citrus fresh scent”.

That’s why my Windex solution is yellow, not blue like Mom’s.

Well, the disinfectant would’ve been helpful, I guess, in Mom’s day with five girls to keep healthy. However, I wasn’t concerned about germs last night. Afterall, I’d not cleaned the windows in two years, and I’ve had no callers at my garage windows.

With genuine, liberating joy, and a tinge of chagrin for neglecting to wash them, I scrubbed the first pane and window frame with an old t-shirt saturated with laundry detergent and hot water.

Then, I used paper towel to dry it.

Next, I sprayed yellow Windex on the glass, then dried it with paper towel.

This I did to the two panes on each window overlooking the gardens I’d weeded, tilled, and mulched with cocoa bean hulls.

At last, as the sun set, I wiped dry the last window pane.

Dear Reader, I leaned against my late husband’s car, and with pleasure and longing, admired the faint, western glow through a crystal-clear window.

I called his name.

Indeed, entirely proper for a girl to do.

Contact Iris at irisfarmletters@gmail.com