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A house upon a hill
Last week I did something I rarely do - I showed a slight interest in a sports game. That's right, it was my company's softball team's game-day and somehow I found it within myself to cheer them on. The game happened to be at Luckett's Elementary off US-!5, north of Leesburg. Before you reach the school, you pass the Raspberry Falls community on the left. Beautiful, they are, gleaming in the dark. Perfect for nighttime drive-bys, if you want to look in the windows to scope out decorating ideas, of course.
As a child, it infuriated me that my mother did not believe in window dressings. That's right, curtains, drapes, hanging newspaper - ever so appropriate in the bathroom. How could I - a young girl - walk comfortably around my own home at night, with all the lights on, when I knew the neighbors could drive by at any moment. Didn't she get it? I couldn't tweeze my eyebrows with my florescent lamp dripping out into front yard, its intensity overshadowing even the street lamp. That's just embarrassing. It was even worse in the winter months, when nightfall came sooner and the more I needed to do in private (shave my legs), the more the facing couple across the way could see me. To top it off, electric Christmas candles sat on the sill in every room for three months out of the year. Coincidentally, after I moved out a year ago they haven't been taken down since.
My obsession with windows came to a climax at a family vacation on Chincoteague Island when I was 15. My mother, my aunt, my sister and I were strolling around our rental neighborhood gossiping and looking at peoples houses. We had waited until the humidity had cleared, around 9 p.m.
"What in the ..."
A three-paneled window revealed a man strolling in from the kitchen to the living room, beer in hand. He had stopped in front of the TV, giving us a few frontal view - of his naked body.
Back home after vacation, my mother still refused to hang curtains, despite my protests that we were living in a fishbowl, for all the world to see, like that man.
Last week, the window curiosity sprang up again in the form of one certain Raspberry Falls home that shined above the rest. I slowed down to look at it. Three levels of all windows. Clearly, I was looking in from the back. I may have been more than a half mile away, I may have been squinting, I may have been trying to drive.
What I did for certain was a double take.
All the lights in the house were on. Every. room. Every. single. one. That can be distracting for drivers. But, that was the point. When it hit me that it was the neighborhood's Model Home I felt betrayed. What was this home? This fake home? What was it trying to do?
I felt like a people-watcher in the mall waiting for a mannequin to undress itself. This home had nothing to show me, as a window-watcher I had been cheated of the possible surprise discovery of a naked man, a self-conscious teenage girl or a dog chewing on the couch.
Resentment would fall upon me if I spent too much time looking into this home and searching for something shocking: I would be disappointed to find only my own reflection bouncing back at me.
So, I looked away and drove on home, wondering why a home with no one in it needed all the lights on.
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