Window TV

Now the same week we discover the mail will not just magically appear at our door like it did in the city, we also begin to wonder what day trash gets picked up. It is of particular concern to us as we have about 40 big moving boxes in our backyard. Guess what? That does not happen just because you unload your furniture at an address either. Turns out you have to hire someone to haul your trash, unless you want to take a weekly drive out to the dump yourself. But at $16 a month, I figure it’s worth not getting banana peels and coffee grounds inside my decidedly non-country friendly coupe.

One thing we do have now I like to call “window TV”. In our living room the large windows face west so we have sweeping views of the Wet Mountain Valley and the Sangre de Cristo Mountains beyond. Today Zoë and I sit and watch a storm blow down the mountains. You can actually see where it begins and ends. It reminds me of spending time as a child at Long Beach Island in New Jersey. We used to rent a house each year, right on the bay, with the same kind of large windows looking east. When storms came in from the west you could look out over the water and just watch the storm rise and come toward you – like a giant, curling hand. This is just the same. Today when the clouds lift, the mountain tops shine bright white with newly fallen snow.

Wow. This is worth all the strange little quirks of adjusting to life in the country, I think. Sitting here with Zoë watching this instead of TV. And then, Griffin shouts from downstairs “Zoë, Spongebob is on” and my bubble bursts. In a flash she is gone. The power of the yellow sponge.