The Window

 

The window.  The little window on the left, with Grandma’s curtains still hanging nicely on either side of the sink. 

I never knew how much that window meant to me.  It was just a window.  We came and went from that house about a million times over the 33 years I spent with her.  And every time we left, there she would be, at that window, waving as we left the driveway, from the time I was a child, through my adulthood and the lives of my children.  She'd wave, and we’d wave back.

That window had never looked so empty as it did the first time I left the house after her death.  There wasn’t just an emptiness, but a cavern on the other side of that glass.   For all the times I’d left the house and waved on my way out of the driveway, I never realized the significance of that simple gesture, or the smile that accompanied it.  I’ll never see that sight in real life again, but I see it in my heart every time I see that window.