Though sorely tempted

I didn't dare

Who says windows must be cleaned?

Not me.

Ghost Signs

Along the top of the building, housing an expensive ice cream shop and art gallery, a ghost sign announces Gilman Paint, TOOLS, CEMENT. Whoever preserved the buildings along the north side of the river in Chattanooga respected the past while updating interiors for the present.

Every day, I am reminded by such ghost sign reminders of the "old days," not the ones only my parents or grandparents talked about, but ones I remember and even younger folks do. Just the other day, a former student sent me a funny video of two children trying to put a tape in a parent's Walkman, something I never owned but the generation below mine certainly did.

Perhaps out of longing for people long gone or nostalgia about my own childhood, I love these ghost signs for the same reason I love weathered brick and wood: like wrinkled faces or ropily-veined hands, they wear their age well.

Weathering

The former dairy building/sculpture studio now serves the renewed University farm, but the wood has not been renewed, a choice I welcome. Boards wear well what's left of their blue paint, peeling and revealing faded cornsilk yellow. Chips, striated and buckled, lift and flake like the tree bark stripped at a saw mill so long ago.

The pigs just across the lane fatten in the pen, the goats across the street stand on hind legs to strip leaves from vines along the fence, Claire's horses in their neighboring pasture pull at grass and stamp and steam on now-cool mornings -- and time moves and time stands still in paint's slow peel.