Last night I dreamed I was skating on glass. Nobody wants for mold to appear unbidden, and flourish, in the airspace between their double-paned windows; but, if it must, they can only hope for the crystal kind whose fine filaments creep into your nighttime with whisperings of snow.
From the Old Norse vindr auga came the word window: ‘wind eye’. Longboats and trade winds carried the word, along with other cargo sounds (fog, freckles, moss, gasp, sky), and it took the place of the Old English eag thyrel—eye-thirl, eye-hole. Words, like men, live and die. The Old Irish heard vindr auga as fuin deóc and their word for window is now fuinneoig. Sounds twist on the wind, morph, reshape themselves and, so, survive.
The mold on my window appeared slowly, at first, as a fog, but soon snow-like crystals surfaced like islands in a frozen sea: archipelagos of spores, remote colonies advancing slowly on the hazy center. A single stray hypha, trapped in the warm air between two panes of glass, has blossomed and burrowed its way into my dreams, a soft and silent invasion.
A dream is an invasion and it is also an evasion—from reality, the quotidian. The view from my window has become mundane; I hardly noticed it until the mold came, obscuring afternoon’s glow on red brick and the wooded slopes of Portland’s west hills. Nothing ever happens here is not the truth of the view, but only my perspective on it, which, too, may reshape itself.
By day, I think: I should call somebody, do something about this. But when night falls, I am skating. I am spinning fast on thin glass. Snow falls down around me and strange words float my way on the wind, replacing one world with another.
I was prompted to write this little essay when I saw a contest on The Paris Review website in celebration of Matteo Pericoli’s new book Windows on the World.
I like these kind of contests – with a limited word count on a specified theme (this contest was 300 words). Like all writing prompts, it alleviates the pressure to think of something (God, forbid!). I often procrastinate writing because I’m waiting for a worthy idea to strike.
Though, I must admit that I needed the incentive of potentially being published on The Paris Review blog to sit down and write about the view from my window. If I saw this prompt in a workbook, I would probably press the snooze button, but I was surprised at the imaginative places my mind wandered to when I thought it might be read by other people.
Writing these micro-pieces requires focus, restraint, and thoughtfulness as every word and sentence counts. I love when an unexpected sentence or idea emerges but, too, I found that I was frequently questioning what, precisely, it was that I wished to communicate, or what feeling I wanted to create in a very short space, and tried to adhere to that and cull the excess and extraneous.
Of course, these things are required of everything I write but it’s easy with a longer essay or story to hold onto a sentence because it’s pretty, or so innocuous as to go unnoticed, a good sign that it’s not indeed needed.
Anyhoo. These ideas are not novel but I thought I’d share them anyway. Needless to say, my strange little mold essay did not win the contest but it’s been a while since I posted a window into my world, so here you go!
(The replacement windows arrived last week, by the by. In case you were wondering if I ever did pick up the phone, call somebody, do something about it.)
A lovely essay, and fully worthy of “The Paris Review.” Keep writing, Deborah–it would be good to hear more from your “word hoard” (to use another Northern kenning).