No one's home
Deerfield Beach, FL, December 2010
About this photo: It's Thematic's windows week, and we're focusing our lenses on windows of all kinds. Please click here if you'd like to share in the fun.Disclosure: This is the development where my in-laws spend their winters. It's known as Century Village East (wiki), and at various times, many of their generation have made this place their winter home.
When we visit, I like to walk the grounds and drink it in. Not because it's great architecture. It isn't. Imagine 1970s-era concrete repeated, almost identically, thousands of times over. It was cheap to build at the time - Red Buttons, who was the development's advertising spokerperson back in the day, would doubtless agree - but it can be overwhelming to the senses, a sad comment on the victory of economics over common sense and basic humanity. A little creativity could have made places like this so much more than what they ultimately became. Oh well, live and learn.
[My mother-in-law reads this. I am so going to get an earful next time we speak!]
Of course, there's beauty in everything if you look hard enough. When we're here, I like to take walks late in the day, when the golden hour sunlight bathes the typically drab concrete in somewhat softer tones. On this particular night, I had been standing here on one of the outdoor walkways for a while. I'm not entirely sure why: I tend to linger in places when I'm on vacation and don't have a clock dictating my every move.
I must have been there for 10 minutes when it dawned on me that I had been completely alone the entire time. No one came in or out. No one passed by on the street. Even the birds seemed to have stayed away.
I stared at the line of windows - I said at, not in...I'm no Peeping Tom, folks - and wondered if anyone was on the inside looking out. In all our time here, I had never seen a face in a window. This isn't a place that invites residents to just sit by a window and take in the scene outside. Which is a bit of a pity, because on this night the sunset was lovely.
Missed sunsets. Life's too short for too many of those.
Your turn: Do you sit by the window and just drink it in?
