For years, my Christopher and I were barraged by window sales people. As soon as we closed on our house in Kalamazoo, they began calling, drawn to new homeowners like blue bottles to roadkill. We stopped answering the phone between nine and five for fear of having vinyl replacement units and storm-proof doors thrust upon us. We prefer old things to new, and that includes toasters and windows. At the Kalamazoo County fair, when I was offered a wooden yardstick free in exchange for filling out a form at the Wholesale Windows booth, I gave a false name and address. In order to seem compliant, however, I took a brochure. There are never any prices on such brochures, nor will the people at the booth or on the phone quote prices--they want to come to your house. The brochure featured little drawings of windows, double-hung, sliding, picture, bay, as cute and irrelevant to me then as as doll-house windows.

I grew up--all the way up, from birth to college-- in a house walled with windows, and as a teenager I took full advantage of my tall Pella Crank-out, roll-screen bedroom windows (whose screens snapped up with a soft ripping noise at the press of two buttons.) Some ancients feared that windows would let evil spirits enter a house, but I snuck outside to join the spirits, evil or otherwise. Now I sit daily before our thirty-pane front window onto which I have suction-cupped a transparent window bird feeder. A column of chickadees, finches, nuthatches, and cardinals come to feed each morning. Each bird fussily plucks a sunflower seed and then carries it away to a better perch to eat, making room for the next bird.

Some months ago, however, windows came to the forefront in a roundabout way. Christopher and I decided to invite his mother, who has emphysema and other health problems, to live with us, which meant we had to put an addition onto the house. We would give her our bedroom with the attached bathroom, and on the other side of the living room we would build a new bedroom plus two offices. Christopher was putting in overtime at the factory to pay for this, and he wanted me to make the window-related decisions. Now I wished I had answered some of those sales calls, kept some of those window fellows on the phone a little while in order to pump them for information, because I had to embark alone on the journey into the world of windows.

There have been windows almost as long as there have been dwellings. Thousands of years ago windows were made of stretched gut or fish bladder, or lambskin or calfskin, according to Let There Be Light, by James Giblin.. They weren't much good, as you can imagine, for looking through, but they did let light into primitive houses. Long before glass, the Japanese used paper, and the eskimos brightened their igloos with occasional blocks of clear ice. Some communities used translucent stone such as mica or gypsum. In their public buildings, the Romans installed thin-cut alabaster which would appear to glow during sunlit hours. I suspect the alabaster had the same effect as the six millimeter plastic which I staple over the outsides of some of our old windows to protect us from the winter weather. To be honest I find this milky effect of blurred greens, blues, and browns thoroughly comforting, a connection to the ancients, perhaps.

New windows, of course, are made of thermal glass, and do not even require separate storm windows let alonen platic sheeting. Any window salesperson could have told me that, but I still didn't want them to come to my house The first window store I went to was set up in an old fruit packing plant. The salesman wore jeans and a baseball cap; he told me that wood has a lot of upkeep and that it would be folly to purchase anything other than vinyl. Vinyl windows are cheap, easy to clean, and never need to be painted. Yes, he admitted, it is unfortunate they only come in white and band-aid color. The second store I tried had tasteful lighting and soft music. The salesman wore a suit, and he told me that purchasing anything other than real wood windows would be folly. Wood, after all, is wood, and it's well worth twice or three times the price.

In homes built before the 1970s, most windows were made up of small panes of glass divided by wood. Large pieces of glass used to be expensive, but nowadays wood is expensive and big panes of glass are cheap so divided windows are becoming a thing of the past. "You wouldn't want those anyway," I was told. "They're too hard to keep clean." I insisted that, in fact, I had lived in a house for eight years with dirty windows and I had no more desire to have suddenly have clean windows than to suddenly have a new husband who picks up his dirty clothes and washes his whiskers out of the sink. (For what unreasonable demands would this new husband put upon me?)

Next, I worked with pencil and paper, deciding where to place my white vinyl single-hung windows (cheaper than double-hung because they don't open at the top). At first I decided to place one window in the middle of every exterior wall of every room, and all these windows would be identical in size. Christopher said fine, but the man who would frame our addition questioned this plan. "Make sure that's really where you'll like them best, when you're sitting at your desk, when you're in bed." So I brought a chair out onto the slab which Harold the concrete man had poured, and I sat in various places, and I lay on my back on the concrete and looked in all directions. I drew new interior views of all walls and put windows where I thought we'd enjoy them most--I added more windows than before, and windows that were bigger.

Then I came across an Atlantic article by James Howard Kunstler, in which he criticized homes designed this way, from the inside out. He said that choosing where to put windows based only on use, rather than looks, "...degrades the community. It encourages people to stay inside, lessening surveillance on the street, reducing opportunities for making connections, and in the long term causing considerable damage to the everyday environment." Was he advocating making the inside of my house so unpleasant that I would prefer to be outside? Would that foster community and make me socialize more with my neighbors? I had never known there was so much to consider--and certainly I hadn't meant my window placement to be a hostile act.

In another book, The Timeless Way of Building, architect Christopher Alexander suggests that before choosing windows (or whatever), you ought to expose yourself to as many windows (or whatever) as you can, and see how they make you feel. Then find what is in common in all the ones that make you feel good. I sympathize with anyone who was driving behind me those weeks as I traversed suburbs and small towns, following Alexander's advice. I watched both sides of the road everywhere I went, studying window patterns, deciding whether a pair of windows side by side looked better with or without a piece of wooden trim between. I compared center-of-room windows to sets of windows which wrapped around corners. Beside these concerns, the precise placement of road signs and traffic signals paled in importance. Cars honked behind me when lights turned green, and I was never able to get out of the car and explain to them that the only way to learn about architecture was to expose oneself to it.

After weeks of such exposure, I stood outside on our 720-square foot slab, and I tried to imagine how various windows would feel around me. But I could only feel was there--the garage to the north, the woods to the east, and our dirt road to the south. In his later chapters, the architect Alexander applies his theory of building to the inside of houses, as well as to the outside. He says that a window that looks out onto something meaningful is a better window. Ideally, he suggests, a window should open onto a river, specifically onto the place on the shore where a little boat is tied, a boat which you yourself row. We don't live beside a river, the overflow from the gutters notwithstanding, so I put my biggest office window, four-by-six feet so it opens onto the woods in which we walk. From this window I will have an excellent view of the compost pile onto which we throw coffee grounds, banana peels, and dryer lint. It worries me that Christopher's mother has little concept of recycling, let alone composting.

Immediately after Steve and his crew finished framing our new structure, the salesman in the baseball cap called to say our windows had arrived. But when I saw them at the builder's supply, all stacked and wrapped in plastic, they looked like somebody else's windows. Would I really have ordered "Care Free Klima-Tite 2000" vinyl windows? Yes, the fellow assured me, those were ours, and we owed him fifteen hundred dollars. Christopher and I loaded the windows into the truck and brought them home. Most slid easily into the holes in the sides of the new walls, almost too easily, as though we were building a Leggo house. Place them, level them, nail them, voila!

The only difficulty was with the three sets of "mulled" windows--those are the windows placed side by side, without trim between--which involved some cutting and fitting. Since I had bought the cheapest utility knife, the blade of which did not retract, Christopher cut his thumb each time he reached into his Carhart jacket, so he bled all over those mulled windows. Though I wasn't bleeding, I got handprints all over the new glass.

Though the windows are installed and plywood and roofing protects us from the harsher elements, there is no siding, no insulation, no electric, no interior wallboard. Each morning, in pyjamas and slippers, I carry my coffee cup into what will be our bedroom and my office, and I lean close enough to fog the windows with my breath. When I move away, the fog instantly clears. This unheated addition occupies a kind of limbo-land between the inside of the house and the outside, and, less obviously, between my old life alone with my handsome new husband and the new life with this other person who will arrive in a few months from Boston. Since we're doing the work ourselves, we're falling behind schedule, so when she arrives, we'll start sleeping on the fold-out couch.

In the old part of our house, the windows are not vast clear stretches. That is partly because of the wooden transoms and mullions dividing the windows into separate panes, and it is partly because I have never cleaned between my storms and the upper sashes. Spiders have built webs up there, in which they have entrapped flies and have left the shells of those bodies suspended among the spun filaments. The places between the old windows seem to me the ideal homes for ghosts as well. But no creatures can build webs in the argon gas sandwiched between the new flawless panes of glass in the addition.

Around the turn of the century, some window glass was called "bullseye" glass, because it was made by spinning a glob of silica until it became a disk. The disk was then cut into panes. The center piece of glass had the bullseye pattern of concentric circles in it, and all the panes had some of that texture. Christopher tells me that people in Boston pay a lot of money now to get fake bullseye glass, glass molded to look like the old spun glass, glass which slightly distorts the view, reminding a person that she is not looking through pure air, but through a solid. Windows, after all, are walls.

I wonder if the largeness and clearness of the new windows makes us part of a modern world of plastic and illusion, a world that is easier to clean, but that is far less romantic. This would be a world in which my own debris and every trace of me and Christopher can be easily wiped clean. If an insane passerby shoots me through my big, clean windows, my blood will wipe easily off the sill, the sash will snap out for easy replacement, and the house will be none the worse for resale. For now, I hope the fingerprints and smudges on the glass will be enough to keep the birds from flying into them.

Christopher's mother has lived in Boston much of her life--now at seventy she will have to adjust to a small town; her emphysema and asthma is only going to get worse because she won't stop smoking. The windows in our old bedroom will probably develop that bluish film I've noticed in smokers' houses

When I pull in the driveway at night, my headlights shine through the windows of the addition, through the skeletal interior walls, and out the windows on the other side, lighting up our building permit. I'd like to get the exterior walls insulated and covered quickly, and then I might nail up some blankets over the windows in case we want to sleep out there on a mattress, but after that, work will slow to a crawl. Our limited finances mean that we'll be a long time finishing this addition, probably years, what with all the electric, and the brick tile around the woodstove, and the wood floors. And years is how long it will take me to get accustomed to Christopher's mother and our new life together, and to accepting this newly claimed space and these new windows with their beautiful, if slightly deceptive views.

Bonnie Jo's Christmas wrap-up: It's been a good year in that no close blood relatives have been convicted of criminal offenses. Darling Christopher and self announce the increase in the size of our house by 800 square feet and six rooms. Eighty feet of this amounted to a loss of storage space as we redesignated Bonnie's bike room as second bathroom and (only) laundry room. As for the brand new east wing, we have just more or less passed our "rough inspection" so insulation and drywall are imminent. Also, darling Christopher has become a citizen after a brief interrogation by officials and a humble ceremony at the Gerald R. Ford Museum in Grand Rapids, Michigan which included people from 46 countries (Vietnam and Mexico gave the largest representation). Ceremony included folk singing and a judge who said to the new citizens, "Thank you for choosing America."

Margie Coles writes from Paris. "The Louvre was overwhelming. I liked going out to see Monet's waterlilies at Giverny better. But really, top of my list is the Rodin Museum and sipping, guzzling, and otherwise imbibing cafe au lait. I've totally butchered the lovely French language and I have found the Parisians to be nonetheless kind and forgiving. L.L.Lopez writes from Long Island, Ontario, Hawaii (I've hiked a volcano, partied at a luau, and island hopped to Molokai), Paris and London. Sharon Durkan writes from Boston on October 4, "We're experiencing a deluge here in Boston today. Jamaica Pond has overflowed onto Jamaica Way. The Fens have overrun onto the Riverway and Mass. Art's Tower Building is flooded and closed.

Biking News: Pat Kellermann biked for a time with Bob in Ireland. If anyone would like the information I received in biking in Spain or Ecuador, please send envelope with two stamps. The Alpers have moved to 359 Green Street, apt. #9, San Francisco CA 94133. "We've moved into the city and we love it--right in the middle of North Beach and Chinatown."

Writing news. My essay "Selling Manure" appeared as the first piece in the book Getting By: Narratives of Working Lives, edited by David Shevin and Larry Smith. The 264-page book is available through John Rollins bookstore, or you can order by mail, by sending $11.95 to Bottom Dog Press, c/o Firelands College, Huron, Ohio 44839. A special bonus on page 22 is a photo of self actually pitching the aforementioned dung, taken by Christopher Magson.

We celebrate with Sonia and Charlie the arrival of little Lucy Glazier, "Date of birth 3/13/96, came home 9/4/96." We lament the recent heroin-induced death of Denise Martin's daughter, Robin Reisch, artist and and local tatooed and pierced celebrity(7/7/76 - 8/26/96).

Farm News: Poor Petunia the dog died peacefully beneath Susanna's desk in the living room one night in November, as did Mike Messer's tarantula. Sam Thompson (Dr. Love) filed bankruptcy, but managed to keep his computer equipment. Comstock elected its first democratic township supervisor in this century. Sister Sheila, upon returning from Texas, remodelled her porch and built a shed. Brother Tom got a great deal on a used hot tub which is now installed behind the house, overlooking the lake, providing an excellent way to spend an hour in a snow storm.) A new road has been put in north of the tracks in Comstock, so Brother George and family now reside at K Ave. Brother Mike has purchased for a pittance a double wide in a trailer park in Kalamazoo.

Red House Island News: F.W. busted a rib in Stratford-upon-Avon and after a few days of sleepless resting, returned home early from his England trip. Siberian weather came early to Michigan, but neither snow nor broken bones will keep him away from his island on the weekend.