This Window

The photo above is what inspires my writing today. I was cruising Flickr and it just popped out at me. This looks very much like the place where spent my summers in Canada while I was a lad. It looks like the outer wall of my bedroom and I often slept with my window open with the curtains often being enough to keep the mosquitoes out.

Where I stayed was a primitive farm on a lake in the wilderness. They did have running water and they did become electrified just a few years previous to my first arrival, however there were no phones or television or machinery. They also had an ice house for their cold storage. They had draft horses to haul their ice from the lake and their logs from the forest and to plough their gardens.

This is where I first saw self sufficiency in action. Nothing was wasted. They grew all their own food and raised their food animals. Their infrequent runs to town were for things they simply could not grow or make on their own.

I was always fascinated by their draft horses. They roamed the unfenced property. The only fences were around the gardens to keep the horses and other livestock out. They didn’t need fences to keep the horses in because the only place the horses could go if they wanted to run away was in the lake or in the woods. Needless to say they were very content to wander and graze in the open areas and never ran away.

Some horses can be very curious. They had one Belgium horse that would often poke its head in my open bedroom window and wake me up. Draft horses are usually large animals with necks and heads nearly the size of a file cabinets. There is something startling about waking up with that sort of presence in your bedroom. After a week or so I just slept through those events.

When I saw this photo I was taken back to a time when a very tall horse poked its head in a window that looked very much like this.