John 15 and the 3-Hour Window

As a new hobby, we check the National Weather Service website every Sunday night. This week’s forecast included a bold splotch of electric blue over the middle part of the week. A weather watch warning announced “wintry mix”—a combination of snow, rain, and sleet that can form worse driving conditions than cold, fluffy snow.

We scurried home from work on Monday night. The lines of traffic on Nicholasville Road were alive with purpose: get food, get home, get inside. Thankfully, I hate to grocery shop and had just stacked the pantry with enough food to last until my next bi-monthly shopping trip. I imagined us snowed in, making daily dents in our stored rations as the storm stretched on for days. I’ve been told stories of hours-long lines in the Lexington Krogers and Meijers. People fill their carts with comfort food: coffee, ham, flour, sugar, hot cereal; enough to cook and eat for weeks if the storm lasts.

Of course, the storms don’t last in Lexington. Cincinnati, a bare hour north, gets three times as much snow as we do. Lexington is generally unprepared for snow and shocked when it arrives, even though it snows regularly here. It reminds me of California, where sidewalks flooded with even an eighth of an inch of rain, which came down often. The cities had no infrastructure to support the weather it nevertheless experienced routinely. Lexington is the same with snow. Two inches of snow in the early morning is enough to close the schools, and it’s happened four times in the last two months. In this litigious age, nobody wants to be the superintendent that left the schools open, indirectly causing a school bus accident in bad weather.

This time, the forecasters were clearly expecting something big. The radios were announcing after school activity cancellations by 2 p.m., and by eight, when three hours of snow had turned suddenly to a fine and musical rain, they closed the schools for Tuesday. A professor of Craig’s, in a possible fit of clairvoyance, had canceled his only class on Tuesday. Craig grinned smugly, already able to watch the storm out the window while putting in a ten-hour day on the computer at home.

The next morning, I looked out the window to see a hard, gray crust that covered the world. The rain had hissed and fizzed all night on the accumulated snow, melting it first and then freezing it. I took the basement stairs to the back door and looked out at the driveway, which was covered by three inches of translucent, silvery-gray ice. I put out a slippered foot, prodding the layer to ascertain its texture. Forget shoveling this stuff (not to mention our continuing neglect to actually buy a snow shovel). It was hard. If it was only a bit smoother, we could ice skate on it. I closed the door, leaving my wet slippers on the mat. We were housebound.

I settled down on the couch with a book, and soon Ally kitty joined me, alighting with a throaty chortle on my lap and prodding my quilt with her paw, then her nose. She wanted to curl up on my lap so I could stretch a blanket over her, tucking her into a cozy cocoon. I’ve never known another cat who actually liked to be covered up. Ally enjoys it so much we take care not to sit on her accidentally when she burrows in blankets, reducing herself to a flat shape that doesn’t suggest her presence deep underneath.

I sat on the couch for an hour, enjoying my book and watching my huge, blanketed pseudo-belly rise and fall with a counter rhythm to my own breath. Out the window, an occasional car slid by, intrepid wheels sending up sprays of slush. The icicles on the front yard trees dripped steadily, heralding a rise in temperature that would probably melt all of the ice by nightfall. Two large trucks rolled past, front loaders angled down to sluice the road buildup onto the gutters and lawns. A nice gesture, but until the crust melted off our sloped, wrap-around driveway, we wouldn’t be going anywhere.

I looked out again, this time taking in the window itself. It’s big, a six-foot square edged by white decorated molding. Piping between the double panes separates the two sides into pleasing, old-fashioned squares that are popular in houses built in the past ten years. I frowned. The winter tableau would be perfect except for just one thing. The window was screened by old, metal mini-blinds. Our house came in surprisingly good condition for a former rental, but certain corners are cut when a house will not be owned and occupied by the same proud family. Almond colored, these tacky blinds clashed horribly with the neat, white flutes and corners of the window moldings. I had painstakingly cleaned them when we moved in, removing years of dust, stains, and pet hair. That was the most I could do to improve them, and it didn’t mitigate the ripply texture that eight years of rough use had imparted to cheap original materials. The bottom stabilizer was warped, curving upwards to skew the left side into lurching crookedness. The blinds were smiling at me, taunting me. Well, what are you going to do about it?

I thought for a moment. Replacement blinds, the 2-inch white woods that should have been installed in the first place, were sitting in the trunk of my car, waiting for just such an opportunity. I got up, displacing blanket-rolled kitty, and walked to the window, thoughtfully assessing the time it would take. A half hour, maybe an hour tops? What better thing to do on a day like this? I imagined finishing out the afternoon on the couch where I begun my day, smugly surveying the new white blinds as they hung pristinely in the already fetching window. Saying goodbye to the horrid metal excuse for a window treatment, I reached out my thumbs, clicking the right side of the blinds out of their metal support.

Here I hit my first problem: while the right side of the blind slid smoothly out of its moorings, the left side was stuck. There I was, holding up one side of the blinds as the other side hung tenaciously on, perhaps sensing that it would finish the day in the trash can unless it took action. I wobbled, pivoted, turned, changed arms to rest, agitated, maneuvered, shook. Nothing dislodged the stuck blind. I tried to put it back, resting it momentarily so I could reassess. It wouldn’t stay.

I had no choice. “Craig?” I called up to the second floor where nothing but the steady click of keys announced the presence of another human being. “Could you come down here?”

“Sure,” he called down. The clicking didn’t stop.

I changed arms again. “Now?” I queried, trying not to betray a small amount of muscle distress.

The blind broke free as soon as the door opened. Craig came down to see me standing impotently in the living room, the detached blind tilting crazily in my hands.

“Never mind.” I apologized sheepishly. Throwing the blind on the ground, I picked up a screwdriver and started removing the old metal moorings that anchored the blind to the window frame. My face scrunched in concentration. The screw turned slowly, a conscientious burst from my arm muscles yielding about a quarter turn. Things weren’t going very well already.

My arms, trumpeting their German heritage, eschew the twin benefits of form and function, being neither shapely nor particularly strong. Craig, ever the gentleman, calls me junoesque (GRE word meaning “tall and stately”) but I see myself digging in my heels as I slide down the slippery slope to flab. When I am fifty, my underarms will probably drape like pooled velvet curtains. Pictures of my ancestors attest to this fact, arms rippling cottage-cheesily out of unflattering sleeveless dresses the What Not to Wear hosts would definitely burn. Their grim expressions lament living in a world before liposuction, and indeed, I wonder if I owe it to them to "get my arms done" someday.

I gave the screwdriver another quarter turn, sighing as I felt my soft upper arm wobble in report. I turned to face my husband, who was watching me. I coyly raised an eyebrow in invitation. “Wanna help?” I purred.

Thankfully, he couldn’t resist my advances and fell in beside me. He removed the other five screws in the time it took me to finish the one I was working on. He regarded my efforts smugly. “This is MAN’S work,” he strutted proudly, flourishing his handful of screws. I was willing to concede the point if it meant I didn’t have to do it by myself. Craig took charge, measuring and drawing lines for the new brackets that would be anchored by long screws disturbingly like the ones we had labored so assiduously to remove.

In minutes, Craig was installing the new screws, and I perched on the couch like a golden retriever, poised to hand over a pencil or trade screwdrivers so he could accomplish his task more easily. This was not the first time Craig was roped into blind installation according to my whims. Our first house needed a new front blind immediately upon occupation, and I was blissfully unaware of the job it entailed. My husband, father, and father-in-law installed, and I came home just in time to beam at them, experimentally raising and lowering my new treasure. I honestly thought that I, who cannily special-ordered it, deserved all the credit. After all, I did all the work.

A week later, I noticed how shabby the kitchen blind looked next to the stylish, new living room blind. Again, I came home from the store with a brand-new blind and enlisted Craig’s help to install it. I still have photographic record of this event. I assume that I was able to walk away and snap a picture because, like now, I was completely useless to the task of putting it up. Craig stood poised over the window, one stockinged foot in each side of our aluminum sink, contorting to fit between the three-foot space between our kitchen cabinets. He was frowning in concentration as he installed brackets identical to the ones we struggled with now. The kitchen blind took two long hours on a Sunday afternoon, Craig’s only day off that week.

After that, no blind, no matter how shabby, was deemed bad enough to warrant replacement. Even the vertical blinds in the family room, mauve in original color and streaked with grease that wouldn’t wash off, received new white slats, not total replacement. I vowed that blinds were not worth the effort, and didn’t renege until we moved. Installing window blinds must be like labor. You eventually forget all about what it involves in the joy of the result, and once it comes up again there’s no going back. We couldn’t just walk away and leave the window bare, bent screws protruding at crazy angles. We had to finish what we started.

So many home improvement projects our marriage has weathered started this way: me thinking I could do the job myself only to break down and ask for help (translation: ask Craig to please do it for me). Our first house, bought in California after three years of saving, reflected the inflated state of the California housing market. It was the absolute most we could afford: 1400 square feet of old paint, old cabinetry, old hardware. Also a previous rental, it came to us in infinitely worse shape than our current house.

It was a great space to cut one’s decorating teeth on, being structurally sound but aesthetically bankrupt. I spent two years worth of school breaks giving the house what the realtors call “pride of ownership.” Our last beautification project was just finished in time for the broker’s sign to go up. My mother-in-law taught me how to paint, and together we mowed wide swaths of Valspar Bistro White over the mauve-and-oatmeal walls. When my roller reached the ceiling, I looked up at the
70’s acoustic texture, spotted with water stains, and rolled over it, too. I learned how light colors create space and dark colors diminish it. Eventually, we had a yellow living room and a blue bathroom, but both paint colors we chose were at the top of the graded swatches we brought home from the paint store.

I watched Craig finish twisting one screw and pick up another to begin. Our lovely, carved window frames seemed to be made of a space-age material that expanded to fill all available space and resisted penetration. The screws would get stuck, and Craig would take them out, drilling a hole to help them screw in better. Then, the screw would not go back into the same hole from which it emerged moments before. The muscles in his lower back tensed with each effort.

I walked to the window and looked out at the ice, which was melting quickly. Water ran under the ice in a channel under our front yard, air pockets shifting silently. Minutes ticked by as I watched Craig, watched the window, watched the world outside melt. Next to me, Craig grunted, forcing the screw to turn one more time through sheer effort of will. The hour I had generously allotted for the task had expired long ago. Every minute that Craig stayed down to help me meant more work left for him to do, which could stretch into the evening when he should be done and resting.

Craig doesn’t care if this blind is off-white or snowflake, metal or wood, new or old, stylish or outdated. When it is installed, he will continue to open and close it every day, looking through it to the outside world, oblivious to the aesthetic effect that a new blind has on the white winter landscape. The only reason that he is doing this is me. I want to look at the world through this blind, and so he leaves his keyboard and rushes downstairs to accommodate me.

This is marriage, it came to me. “Greater love has no one than this: that a man lay down his life for his friend.” Most people see this verse in the context of death: a momentary sacrifice of one’s living body, self-immolation so that others may live. But what is “laying down one’s life” if not just that: the giving up, moment by moment, of the infinite possibilities of each day so that they can be spent together, united in purpose, combined in service each to the other. Craig, having the freedom to do as he willed this afternoon, instead chose to cramp his shoulder and tax his patience because doing so would make me happy.

It did more than that. As I stood there by the window, it took my breath away.