Skywatch Friday: Weather Window

Nana's Kitchen Window 7-1-09

Every year when I return home to Colchester I stay with my mother in the house she grew up in. I know it as Nana and Grandpa's House, but it has been my mother's since 1999. As is typical in many New England homes, not much as changed since I was a child. The kitchen still has the old cast iron farm sink and the cupboards are still painted in the same colors as when my Nana was alive. I don't know when it started, but it became my ritual to go to this window first thing in the morning and at various times throughout the day to look at the sky and check on the weather and read the old thermometer that hung outside on the glass. Living in New England is all about the weather and somehow that old thermometer gave me a sense of comfort to look and see that the temperature was as good or as bad as I suspected. So, imagine my chagrin when I arrived this year and walked to the window and the thermometer wasn't there! Apparently it had been removed last year when the storm windows were taken down to be repainted. No one had bothered to put it back up again.

For me, I felt lost without it. I could not believe what a ritual checking the thermometer had become, and though I knew it wasn't there any longer, the whole time I was at my mother's house I still kept walking to the window to check on the weather. I hope she puts a new one up before I come back next year. I don't think I could take feeling this lost again!

SKYWATCH FRIDAY!