in praise of screen windows

they make summer better

Praise the screen window, through which rain comes while sleepers sleep; praise the dampening sill and the breath breathed out like breath through the light curtain; praise the smell of the rain rising from wet street through warm wet air into sleepers’ dreams, and the sleepers now talking or turning in their sleep.

Praise the window: praise screen and hook and latch, praise the way in spring on first warm days the stile will not ride the jamb at first, but sticks, until, with a leap, it opens and the air comes in, with scents of melt and mud. Praise the smell of the screen, metal and sour, the tang slipping up your nose as you press your face against it, in memory or in childhood. Praise the way the screen holds indentations like minds hold faces there. That’s where the dog ran through the screen, or remember when you fell asleep in your open window, refusing to be put in bed? Praise these metal screens themselves, against which mosquitos whine and junebugs bonk. Praise fly prevention and the exchange of air. Praise precise feet of katydid bright-greenly going one by one up the ladder of the screen.

Praise the screen window. Praise it even in winter, filled with frost the first thaw won’t remove. Praise the ice-flowers on it and the rain that catches in each angled cell. Praise the smell of bonfires through it on the last October day you’ll throw the sash, and praise the night in August when, waking halfway through, you know the season’s changed because the room is cold.

Praise the screen window—praise the air that moves from neighbors’ rooms across the side yard into to ours. Praise the smell of cooking, praise the variousness of smells. Praise asafoetida and cumin, chili, oregano, garlic, onions, butter; praise meat-scent flowing past the houses of vegetarians and the smell of beans making its way through the houses of the rich. Praise the sound of someone else’s children; praise the ordinary fight. Praise the way the open window lets us hear a call for help. Praise music; praise piano, drum, and bass; praise even scales repeated without end. Praise someone else’s lovemaking on a morning we slept in.

Praise the screen window; praise the clean air of morning and the worn-out air of afternoon, praise the sunlight, praise the cold. Praise windows open on December mornings to clear the foggy shower out; praise open windows and their holy screens every day of June. Praise the hygienic fact of sunlight—a praise that’s sure there’s nothing there to hide. Praise the anyway: the open window and the fact of sun. Praise all the season’s dust that sits inside the lock.

Praise the screen window, praise the city entering our cells, praise the point at which our space becomes, without our saying so, out there. Praise passersby, and bass from idling cars, and clapping rhymes, and even spit. Praise the sense that we belong to everyone, the refusal to reserve our us for us. Praise the entering in of every other being’s breath to ours. Praise passing cars, passing annoyance, and the passing rain, which, falling now again, will drawn us to the sill. Praise what’s in us that’s most like a child: most curious, unguarded, willing to be surprised, most open to the world of this is what there is: and we are here.

I hope that, if it’s summer where you are, you have the pleasure of screen windows. (I don’t know why, but everywhere I’ve lived in Europe the houses/apartments have not had screens. It’s one thing that would massively improve my quality of life here in Ireland: no moths! No mosquitoes! In the non-renting future, if there is such a time for me, there will be screen windows.)

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In other news, last summer I spent June 20th with Nina MacLaughlin, Linda Penfield Danilek, Kasey Jueds, and Margaret Funkhouser making graphic scores (mine is below) for the solstice. Two musicians joined us that evening and played the scores. We were lucky that they also recorded their improvisations and made an album, which is out on Bandcamp this week. There’ll be a listening party on Wednesday (June 21) at 9 p.m. Irish time/4 p.m. US Eastern. You’re welcome to join!

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Thank you for reading. See you in a week!