One Woman's Perspective
Last Week's Column

Jamie's Window
by Kira Sampson

n 1988, my husband went to Korea for a year (for the Air Force), so our son Jamie and I moved into a condo in Santa Rosa, California, to await Kevin’s return. In the beginning, I tried to keep Jamie from climbing up to look out the window in his bedroom. After all, he was only 18 months old at the time, and the bottom of the window was a good four feet off the floor. First I put his combination toy box/bookshelf in front of the window. He just used that as a ladder. Then I put his chest of drawers in front of it, but he would beg me to lift him up so that he could see out, and when I wouldn’t, he’d pile up whatever was handy and try to climb up himself.

Finally I decided that if he was going to climb up there anyway, I would do what I could to make it safe for him. I bought a utility step stool, and moved the chest of drawers over a few feet so that he could climb up the stool and then sit on top of the chest and look outside.

Every morning when I opened the curtains, the first thing Jamie would do was climb up and look out. Many mornings we were rewarded by the sight of one or more brightly colored "hot-hair balloons" (as Jamie called them) rising above the trees far to the west of us. If the weather was going to be foggy, we knew it immediately since the ocean was to the west, and the morning mists usually rolled in from the coast.

There was a large expanse of lawn just outside the window, and many times while I was cooking dinner Jamie would sit and watch one of our neighbors play fetch with her dogs. One dog preferred a ball, the other, a Frisbee. Of course, Jamie’s preference was to be out on the lawn himself, running around and playing with the dogs, and I took him out as often as time and weather permitted.

Just beyond the lawn was a huge vacant field overgrown with weeds. That spring we would sit watching a little hawk that would perch on the electrical wires which stretched between the lawn and the field, and swoop down to capture a field mouse or whatever caught his eye. Several of our neighbors took their dogs to the field for their daily walk, and we would see the occasional squirrel or rabbit fleeing from the romping dogs.

At the end of the day, the last thing Jamie and I would do before I closed his curtains and tucked him in was stand at the window and watch the sunset fade and the stars come out. On clear evenings, there was a certain point, just after the sun sank below the horizon, but before blackness descended, when the sky took on a deep, gorgeous hue I call "Maxfield Parrish Blue." Then Jamie and I would watch Venus setting, and sometimes the moon would shine down on us through the leaves of the sycamore trees lining the edge of the lawn. Those tender moments the two of us spent together, glorying in the beauty of the sky above us, are some of my most treasured memories of Jamie’s childhood.

Early in the summer, just before Kevin’s tour of duty was up, the owners of the field decided to build an office complex there. Jamie got to watch all kinds of heavy machinery busily rearranging the landscape, which thrilled him, but saddened me. I knew we had to move away. I just wanted things to stay the same for the short time we had left. But things never stay the same. Change is inevitable, and all we can do is cherish the precious moments we have had, and look for new times and new memories to treasure.

Kira Sampson is a writer, homeschool mother, news editor, and editor/publisher of two newsletters, one for her local homeschool group and the other for a local writer's group.

She is also one of the Founders of VegSource. Her column, One Woman's Perspective, is a regular feature of VegSource On-Line Magazine.