House renovations

The Shadow of Your Wings: Hymns and Sacred Songs; Fernando Ortega

A curious thing about our house on the farm was the way that we labeled each room. Upstairs, before we remodeled, there was Mom and Dad’s room, D. and K.’s room, a closet and my room. I was the only one who had his own room. There was also a landing at the head of the stairs with a hallway that led to my sisters’ room, my room and a mini play area where we could keep our toys and shelve our books.

Downstairs, we had the living room, the kitchen, a south porch, a north porch, a pantry and a room that we called the bedroom. Even our rooms upstairs didn’t hold the title of “bedroom”; they were … our rooms. I don’t know why we called that downstairs room “the bedroom”. The piano, the sewing machine and the vacuum cleaner were kept in that room. There wasn’t room for a bed in there even without the piano, sewing machine and vacuum cleaner.

Some time in the early 70's, Mom and Dad decided that they could afford to spruce up the old house a bit. Dad had heard of a carpenter named Mr. Swaney who he hired to do the work. The south porch had been too drafty to be of any use in the winter time except as a place of storage. So we put carpet down, installed some electricity outlets and walled up a window where the cold had been seeping through. At that point we renamed that room the south room. We detached the north porch from the house and dragged it out into the trees where we kids could play house with one wall missing. In its place, we built a new bathroom and a utility room with a closet. This new facility got dubbed the north room. The bathroom we decided to call the bathroom. The kitchen, which stood between the old north porch and the old south porch, acquired new cabinets, a new counter and a new sink.

At some point, Mom had put in a request for a picture window that looked east out onto the front lawn. Mom, what’s a picture window? Is there a picture in it? “No.” Is there a picture above it, beside it or underneath it? “No.” When you look inside from the front lawn can you see a picture? “No.” Okay, then, well, I, uh, … I'm sorry, but I have no idea what you’re talking about. So, you let me know when it’s done and then let’s try this again.

I don’t know if the term “picture window” ever really got explained to the satisfaction of a perplexed five-year-old, but the actual picture window, whatever it was, was a hit to everybody. Especially to our cat, Snoopy. Snoopy had belonged to my great uncle Evans, and when Uncle Evans passed away, we offered to take Snoopy. Snoopy wasn’t named after the dog from Peanuts. Even though all cats are curious by nature, Uncle Evans apparently felt that this cat had received a dose or two extra of feline inquisitiveness, hence the name. Snoopy would sit on the window sill and put his wet nose up against the window pane, forming a line of nose prints about one to two inches in width at nine or ten inches above the sill all the way across the window.

Last March during Lent, Scott, the pastor at Wallace Presbyterian Church, requested that we sing a special song by Fernando Ortega called, “Sing To Jesus”. Normally, I rely on someone in the office to supply me with the sheet music, but we didn’t have the sheet music for this song. They encouraged me to either view a performance by Mr. Ortega on YouTube or to download the song from iTunes. I did both. The song is awesome. I was particularly entranced by the performance on YouTube. It had been taped at Christmas time, even though it wasn’t specifically a Christmas song. The scene with Christmas trees and Christmas lights had made for a stunning video.

But it was nothing in comparison with … you guessed it, the album cover. I don’t think that I have to say too much about it as you saw it at the beginning of this entry. Allow me to encourage you to click on the album cover above in order to see a bigger version on the image. I state as emphatically now as I did when I first saw the picture on the front of this CD that if the mansion I receive in heaven gets the celestial view that this desert scene gets, I want a picture window.

Credits: To carpenters everywhere, who continue to keep alive the secondary profession of our Lord Jesus.