Windows and Closets: A Journey from Hidden Corners to Open Views

As a child, I was intrigued by the act of hiding: in a closet, beneath a blanket, behind the thick rims of my glasses. To this day, I often think that the world cannot see the sadness, the elation, the bubbling hope in my eyes because this emotion is hidden by my glasses. Creative people thrive on observation, but some prefer to hide from the world – a form of self-preservation, like the poet who begins each day looking out of her kitchen window. It is safer for her to watch the red house finch flit upon the breeze than to test her own wings in uncertain times.

As a child, I would spend hours looking out of the windows of our Chicago bungalow. In the winter, I watched thick flakes of snow tumble onto the chain-link fence, casting a crystalline spell over the narrow, trash-can-lined alleys in our neighborhood. In the summer, long after the Good Humor ice cream truck left a phantom trail of music box lullabies, I would watch the red crackle of heat lightning ignite the humid night sky. Our house was cooled by window fans; my view of the neighbor’s kitchen window was obscured by the whir and click of revolving metal.

To widen my view and escape the summer heat, I hid behind the yew trees outside of our house and dug for ants and worms in the cool soil. My grandmother lived in a flat above our bungalow. I would scrounge around her kitchen for old coffee cans.

BLOWIN’ IN
SUSAN MANGAN
@SueMangan
est. 2006
WRITING FOR 17 YEARS

“The birds are in their trees, the toast is in the toaster, and the poets are at their windows . . . In every section of this tangerine earth . . . Which window it hardly seems to matter though many have a favorite, for there is always something to see.”
(“Monday” by Billy Collins)

The cans became lush jungles filled with sticks and detritus that I uncovered in our small Chicago garden. Tomato vines, grass, prickly stems from overgrown, rotting city pines became a world of adventure for the ants and worms that I excavated from the earth.

After a much-needed bedtime bath, my mother would braid my long, curly hair. During these moments, my mother’s Ozark accent returned as she gently chastised me for the rat’s nests that tangled my hair. She tried to distract me from the tug and pull by reciting lines from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. My mother told me about Mowgli, the boy raised by wolves, and the tales of Rikki-Tikki-Tavi, a most heroic mongoose.

I was a precocious child and reckoned that I should be able to play in my own would-be forest like Mowgli and not have to bother with tightly plaited bedtime braids. One night, I chose to hide away in my closet so that my mother would not be able to braid my hair. I wanted to be free to roam and dream, imagine, and create without civilized childhood burdens like bathing and hair braiding.

I was, however, unsure as to how long I would have to hide in my closet. At the very least, I would have to stow away until the early morning when my mother left for her job as a nurse. Surely by that time my hair would be dry, if not untangled. Again, I considered my plight. Would I become hungry, thirsty, or bored? Boredom ranked as my number one concern, so I brought my crayon box into the hiding place. Even though my bedroom closet was not very far from the kitchen, the bathroom, or my parents’ bedroom, I felt miles away, hidden in the half-darkness, ideas illuminated beneath the dim light of an exposed lightbulb.

Perhaps in years to come, I thought, another child would steal away into the closet when he or she did not want to succumb to rituals like tooth brushing and bathing. And so, I left my self-portrait on the closet wall for future adventure seekers, children with like-minded creative sensibilities.

After I graduated from college, I left my home in Chicago to move to Cleveland. I gave a final look around my yellow room and peered out of the shuttered window that framed a weed-covered strip of yard. It was there, alongside the chain-link fence, that I dug up earthworms and ants. Looking out of that window, I remembered the portrait I scribbled on the wall of my closet, wondering if it was real or a conjured memory.

As my mother gave a final call to gather my things, I told her that I had one more item to collect. In my heart, I knew it was not something concrete that I wished to find, but rather the machinations of an introverted little girl with a big imagination.

Crouching down into the darkness of that closet, I could still make out a stick figure drawn in red crayon of a girl with a triangle for a body. Interestingly, the girl’s hair was not long and wild like Mowgli, the Jungle Boy, but rather plaited into two braids sticking curiously out of either side of her perfectly round head. There, hidden in the back of that closet, a portal to my little girl self opened wide and made me laugh. I looked out of my bedroom window at the phantoms of my past and realized that sometimes you need to open the windows wide to let changing winds lift you out of hiding.

Susan holds a Master’s Degree in English from John Carroll University and a Master’s Degree in Education from Baldwin-Wallace University. She may be contacted at [email protected].