Decorative WindowsApril 22, 2019
It’s Easter Saturday and in a spare 10 minutes I grab my materials and toss them on the corner of the bed – a chalk marker, a pile of inch paper triangles and a glue stick. It takes 2 tries to get the wavy line right and I run out of triangles. It looks like the bunting has escaped someones clutches, I kind of like it’s flow.
I started decorating windows many a Christmas ago, it’s common then, but it’s the Palm Sunday leaves that I find most meaning in. Theses simple brushstrokes, of chalk and water paint, arch over the screen of my view, they frame the way I see the world outside my little sanctuary of home.
they frame the way I see the world
I draw palm leaves on the windows that lead outsides and those between rooms. I steep myself in the waving branches that proclaimed the king comes. Through their boughs I see friends and family walk the daily toil, see the gossiping neighbor, the necessarily independent child, the peddle bike and speeding van, the binmen, the wandering stranger. The ordinary people, the doubters and those who’d proclaim ‘Hosanna’.
They wipe away easily to put up the bolder designs of Easter – for it’s Easter in this house even if it’s not yet reached the orthodox friends around us.
I’ve learnt that this little practice of decoration is a subtle call to those around us, there is something happening here. While it colours my perspective looking out, it also acts as an invitation to look in.
At Christmas the silhouettes are best viewed outside when the light inside illuminates them. Our light shining out a message of seasonal cheer. At Easter the colours are bright, spring like and full of the joys of home spilling out of the seams into the growing warmth beyond our door. It’s an open permission to peer into the window of our lives, to invite you in, to connect even through the closed door.
The windows of a house are it’s eyes, it’s connection that so often gets shuttered and draped, closed to the prying in strives of privacy. Like many who rent we can only live with house body we’ve been provided, but it’s eyes will light up with a little water and powdered chalk – perhaps add a few chalk markers or whiteboard pens, a can of spray snow, some card, paper and a little glue. The windows clean leaving no mark but the decor has marked me. They marked the memories and the days, marked the views of my soul and the way my sanctuary and God’s big world mingle.
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