Come to my window

I promise I'm not stalking Mrs. Chicken, but she has another interesting post on her blog this week about the fascination of being a voyeur. I'll let you read her post because it's better than reading my paraphrase of her post, but I saw myself in her story about the "allure of... glimpses of someone else’s ordinary evening." Nothing creepy, but I still find it fascinating to see in the windows, whether literal or virtual. Probably part of why I like the movie Rear Window so much -- I get the fun of inventing a story around that tiny glimpse.

Okay, go ahead. Read it -- I'll wait. Seriously -- you don't really need another link, do you?

So here's my "window" -- the photo of me when I was reading her post yesterday. No make-up, bed-head, still sweaty from the morning's walk pushing 75 pounds of children and stroller around our hilly neighborhood. I'm in what my husband calls "Command Central" -- it's the corner of my kitchen counter where my laptop sits most of the time. While my children are napping, I catch up on email, read blogs, check Facebook and prep for dinner. It's not glamorous, but it's me -- and most days, I'm happy with that.

But if you happened to walk by my house later on last night (and one of my friends was doing just that), this second picture is what you saw... not through our window, but outside at the curb. It's Junius and his Daddy watching for lightning bugs.

This sweet scene started when my husband heard Junius walking around upstairs after he should have been asleep. When he found Juni awake, he suggested a trip to the potty might help. Junius looked out the bathroom window into the almost-darkness and said, "Da -- look at that! What's that little light that keeps blinking? Look -- there it is again!"

And so the boy with the early bedtime got his first trip outside on a summer night to catch fireflies with his wonderful father. His eyes wide with excitement, his voice hushed in the dark, Juni went out and hopped around the yard with us as we tried to show him what a lightning bug looks like up close.

Before we went back inside to bed, he turned and said in his most earnest little voice, "Thank you, Da. Thank you for taking me outside to see the fireflies."

If you like, show me your window now... what would I see as you read this post?