When we bought the house in Maine, more than a decade ago, and set to work on renovating it, one of the places we left virtually untouched was the old Pantry.  A few weeks ago, when we began work anew, I showed the room (above) in a post and a whole bunch of you loved on it as much as I have.

It had a variety of issues, not really useful anymore.  A bit of dry rot here, a bit of mold there, a lot of water damage in a lot of everywhere.

Its was an odd little room, self-identifying more as a hallway I think. Which is what it will now be.

I remember walking into it early on, and thinking that there was something odd about how dark it was.

I told JoHn right then and there that I envisioned a window taking up the whole wall at the end of the pantry.

Sure, there was a window already there, a rather large one actually. But when you were standing outside the room, you didn’t even really know it was there. And when you walked in, your eyes were drawn straight to an old slate sink, unplumbed long ago if it ever was, and the solid dark wall above it. The window was off to the side, and about a third of it (and its light) was hidden down behind the cabinets.

Also?

If you leaned way over the counter and looked down, you could see the Sill Graveyard for the flies and moths and ladybugs lured there by dastardly panes of glass that teased them with, but denied them access to, the wide world beyond.

My vacuum cleaner did double duty as a grave robber/body snatcher… for more than ten years.

So that was that and I knew it.

My window was kind of a dick.

It was also, I am told by experts (okay, the builders), a bit unstable.

So, yep, it had to go.

But it never really seemed to be the right time me to eighty-six it.

We were renovating or restoring some other part of the house, or barn or back yard or front yard or side yard or driveway or basement or attic or …. man I just got really tired and had so many flashbacks… hang on.

Where was I?

Oh right.

So when we needed to find the space to have a bed downstairs, just in case we ever need one, the only place that made sense was in the back of the house, and it required reworking the pantry.

So it was time… well, is time.

Here is the current view of the ‘new’ hall:

But if you look closely, you can see some blocking on the floor.  And see all those horizontal pieces of wood pretty much from that to the ceiling?

Uh huh.

What do you think that is going to be.

Floor to ceiling window baby.

This time I ran the new window, the one coming in, through a few psych tests and the results showed it to be quite balanced with a positive attitude.

I have waited a long time for this window.

Sure, I get that a window is kind of insignificant in the whole ‘stuff I want out of life’ list.

I mean, firstly, it’s in the ‘stuff’ category. Like, material stuff. Which we actually need very little of to, you know, live.

One step up from that is the ‘experiences’ category, like living in Australia or hiking in Montana or photography or writing or Disney World (okay, Disney World might be a little more major), or or or.

Then up at the tipity top are the relationship things like friendships and love and family stuff (whether you have kids or not (or dogs or not)). And there are all sorts of wishes of health and happiness and contentment that go hand-in-hand with the top three ‘stuff’ categories. Those are BIG stuffs.

So the window is a little ‘stuff’, just so we are clear.

But.

The thing that hit me last week, when I went up to Maine and discovered that I was a chosen vampire slayer, was that there have been so many times in my life when I thought it was the right time for something… whether a material something or an experience something or a relationship or heath or happiness something… and not only did it not happen at that time, but no matter what I did, I could not force it to happen.

And sometimes things even went sideways.

It’s not that things eventually worked out exactly the way I wanted them to, that I just had to wait. Sometimes things happened that I could have never predicted, and it just all made so much more sense than I ever thought it could.

Love, family, friends, the right pair of shoes that fit my abnormally large feet…

The big stuff and the small…

It doesn’t always take a death, or illness or something earth shattering to remind me to have faith. Sometimes it’s something seemingly insignificant.

Sometimes it’s something downright silly.

During the last major tweak of an old house in Maine, a window will exist where I wanted one to be. It refused to happen earlier, no matter how much I tried to force it.  But it is happening now, as a part of a project I did not foresee, and in a different way than I imagined it.

And I was reminded.

Again.

Thanks for readin’.

And, yes, I am well aware that I just said “our last major tweak to the house” and I’m freaking out at the bad juju I may have just set in motion. I am already promising the universe oodles of good behavior (and am on my lapsed Catholic knees, apologizing to the heavens, once again, for missing Lent).

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