- In response to Marianne West’s prompt and deeply inspired by @kimberlylane.
Describe the view from your bedroom window
6am: I am lying half awake. Lou reminds:
All I'm really asking is, what are we doing here / Are we just killing time / just living year to year
. . . humankind gets so lost in finding its way / We have a chance to make a difference till our dying day
And I sigh, OK. Our time here is precious. Who needs more than 4 hours sleep. I leap out of bed into all the more time to stare at fences, hoping they’ll fall down all by themselves like goats. (Military man that I am*.) I throw open the window and draw in the fresh air, and see with my myopic vision that everything is still there.
I’ve been doing little else the past two rainy weeks but look out of my bedroom window. At the fig, at the fences, at the mini jungle, at the fences, at the puddles dancing by themselves on the tarmacked sheds, at the fences, at the blackbird (would she be the same mum but better now, and not be leaving her bristly, mowhawk nestlings on anyone else's kitchen doorstep like a cat, working them out of her nest for some kind of stress), and back at the fences (I have four adjacent neighbors, so did I mention I have a lot of delapidated, rickety, unsightly fences to look at?).
I listen a little to the familiar swan-song of the fig* with one ear, and the singer in the background with the other, and I am not quite sure anymore which is the worse ear for hearing out for hope.
I relish the silence of this early hour. No extractor fans, yet. No builders building everybody else’s fences. No undiagnosed and unchecked grubs nextdoor terribly confused about how to just enjoy eachother while they can, before they realise they are bound by some law to tolerate eachother and bound by the Individualisation Era we are in to defy it like their rivalry insists. No slamming of the planks of the fence that isn’t that badly in need of attention, so say the couple, so say the lawyer, so say the couple-lawyer, so say a lot less the family with two sickly children who always stay indoors, having given up on other people’s fences.
I might not ever sit at my bistro table again. I look at it from my bedroom window instead. Either the rains won’t cease, or I’d get electrocuted for trying in the 99% humid air; or the fences won’t fall and I’d never get to fix anything anymore. Who needs a garden then? There is only so often one can step into a voluntary solitary confinement pretending to be a haven of peace, to exude against the monotone the trust that dissolves the boundaries of everybody's right to a space, - naturally, even a shoe has its box - and to melt all our notions of disrepair into a spectrum of give and give more. Don’t fix it if it isn’t broken works for me. Don’t throw away a fence if it still has a post to stand on. But from Clara Peeters‡ we may learn that if you are going to be bourgeois for the sake of a new republic, then be dilligent and chaste in your domestic upkeep.
I don’t hate my neighbours, I only say if the plane crashes in the Andes, with all of us five on board and you Steemians, think of eating No.24, first. Plenty to go around; and will save you the delegation you first thought well spent on a lawyer and leader of women, but a lawyer with crooked facts and a disdain for all other women.
I don’t hate my neighbours, but there is no avoiding them from my bedroom window, first thing, last thing, intermittant. However, as long as it rains I can veil the mean time.
I have so much hate to give, what else to do with my love that doesn’t know how to hammer or drill or screw or fix anything at all by myself for you?
Footnotes
*
Still from film “Men Who Stare At Goats”.
† Agreed to be cut down coming winter. Currently flourishing like never before. No further agreements have been accomplished after 6 months of men-only gatherings, organised by the women for the men, hoping rather, to our shame, to offload. Meaning however, as a single woman myself, I am the only one not invited or in the loop of my own project. Never mind. What are dads for if not to represent their little princesses, even if it makes them scowl and grumble at the work women make for them.
‡ 
Still Life with Cheeses, Almonds and Pretzels, c. 1615,. Another rare example of a successful (post) Renaissance female artist, who paints the prosperity of the Dutch at that time in minature, with "breakfast pieces, as feminine translations of the concentrated ideals of the new prosperity and peace. She captures the values which made the Netherlands enter their Golden Age: plenty, stillness, moderation, religious discipline (Protestantism). You will find the added feminine (and therein the value of domesticity) present in the self-portrait reflected in the pewter lid of the wine jug.