Dirty Window

You never realize how dirty your windows are until they catch a brilliant setting sun. I tried to remember the last time I cleaned that glass but I really don't recall. It put in mind the windows of a really dirty car....when some kid writes with his fingers "Wash Me." I'll put that on my list.
There's always stuff on my list: clean the gutters, cut the field, trim low hanging limbs so that I don't drive one six inches into my eye when I'm on my riding lawn mower. I'm fairly sure that wouldn't be fun.
Driving in this morning at 6:30 a.m. the haze in the eastern sky was thick as a vail. I think it made the sun angry because it was even hotter today than yesterday. Not sure how we survived without air conditioning.
When I was a kid growing up in West Pratt, the old house did not have AC. We had an old fan that shaped like an ottoman. It was round and sat in the middle of the living room floor. The downturned vents blew air toward the floor and from there it was dispersed around the room. We had to turn the black and white TV up loud enough for the neighbors to hear because of the old fan, but that was a small price to pay.
At night we had a window fan as big as a VW that we put on reverse. It pulled air from the other rooms and blew it out the window as exhaust. This might sound inefficient, but each bedroom had windows and everyone would open their windows up about three inches...the VW fan sucked in air from all the bedrooms and blew it outside. This created a constant breeze which was comfortable on hot August nights. I was thankful for that old fan. In fact I have one just like it in our barn just in case our AC goes out.
In those days you went to sleep listening to the sounds of cicadas, tree frogs, and freight trains rolling through Old Dora on its way to Mississippi. You could almost set you clock by that ol' train.
My older sister got a Sylvania Transistor radio that was the size of a brick and almost as heavy. She would put that radio under the covers and listen to the radio at low volume each night. It was too low for our Dad to hear it, but I could hear it clear as a bell. There was a station out of Memphis that played Elvis and Carl Perkins and that old Sylvania picked it up like it was broadcast from Watkins Drug Store in Dora.
It's funny how a dirty window can send you down such an unexpected path.