We went walking again this morning. Today we chose a different neighborhood. We’ve been staying in a neighborhood of older homes built in the early 1960’s. Today we went a little further afield into a neighborhood built in the mid to late 1980’s. And we saw some horrors. LightHusband observed that they looked as if the architectural features had been subjected to some mutating forces. Windows that were too long and too close together. But my personal favorite were the “widows walks” with no entrance in the middle of suburbia and no access to the sea.

I hail from seafaring folk in early Massaschusetts and early Maine who used the real widows walks much to their chagrin. To see them used so lightly and as an architectural “feature” seemed both funny and disrespectful all at the same time. My widowed, many greats grandmothers wouldn’t think it was funny at all. Or …. maybe they would. Maybe they would double up with laughter to think that the rails they had spent many days and nights walking with worry and fear were now a costly architectural “feature” on a home many, many miles from the sea.

And then I got a picture in my mind’s eye of someone up on top of these suburban homes, scanning the horizon for their husband’s car amidst the sea of cars on I-66. Maybe it’s not anachronistic at all …