The view from my childhood bedroom window was the kind they write into the backgrounds of novels about devastatingly beautiful people who stare through bubbled glass at the rolling countryside while considering their trials. In the movie adaptation, the camera moves from their perfectly painted faces and pans out to the wide, lush world that contains them. I would sit in my window and wonder if anyone would mistake me for a literary heroine. I wondered if I looked beautiful in my window. In reality I looked more like Steve Urkel than Elizabeth Bennet, but that's the power of daydreams; you don't have to be you in your daydreams, and certainly everything would be different if I wasn’t me.
The view itself was a verdant display of coastal beauty; palmetto trees, hydrangeas, and mossy oaks dotted across a green lawn that gently sloped into the salt marsh. The marsh grass stood tall, bright green or nearly golden depending on the season, and it stretched across iridescent pluff mud and oyster beds until it gave way to Charleston Harbor. I could sit in my bedroom and count the church steeples Downtown or watch cars cross the bridge into Mt. Pleasant. I’ve decided that giving a view like this to a sensitive and imaginative child sets them up for a lifetime of gentle sentiment and nostalgia. My sister’s bedroom window looked out over our hot, tar driveway and she turned out to be a real bruiser.
Please enjoy this fabulous sky we had a few nights ago.
Because of the window, I did a lot of sitting and thinking. I was six or so, and I created a fantastical inner world that made it hard to relate to the sticky kids I had to hang around at school. I would recoil into myself to think deeply on why they were always so loud and damp. I figured something must be amiss at their homes, and I would complete my assignments while wondering about the unmet needs of my classmates.
And now that time has passed, I can look back and see that people are mostly already who they will be when they’re still in elementary school, but we have to wait thirty years to be able to turn it into anything. Maybe twenty if we're lucky. I was a squeamish, nervous, introvert in kindergarten, and very few things have progressed from there. My sister was a bossy, impatient, hall-monitor of a kid and she’s still just as frenzied. My dad; a door-to-door bubblegum salesman at five years old. He goes on to dominate in international sales. So it’s all right there in the elementary school squirts. We just have to let them age nicely in temperature-controlled cinderblock institutions until the precise moment of their own clarity.
But back to the view from my window. My formal education was a background character of my childhood. The main character and my real education was my homelife - an ongoing study of the people that were raising me, the potential harms and benefits of my burdensome older sister, the girl next door who I wanted to be just like, my ten cousins, four strange grandparents, and the unnerving people at church on Sunday. Who cares about writing in cursive with so much wonderful chaos to study at home?
