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November 22, 2008
“The Milky Green Stained Glass Window”
Yesterday I visited the lot where the house at 1950 Halleck Street once stood.
Background: When I was a very young child, I spent quite a bit of time at my grandparents’ home at 1950 Halleck Street in Detroit, Michigan. Before we were old enough to attend school, my cousins and I spent our days there while our parents advanced their careers at their respective jobs.
While there was no longer a wood yard on the property (see my latest book Who’s Jim Hines? for more on the wood yard), we youngsters found plenty to do in the back and side yards—running up and down the back porch steps, climbing the lowest boughs of the fruit trees, peering at the sky through the huge grape arbor.
I also was mesmerized by something next door to my grandparents’ side yard. It was a milky green stained glass window on the side of the neighbor’s house. I would just stand there in the side yard and stare at that window. There was no intricate leaded design to catch my attention. Just a sheet of glass colored with milky green swirls. But for some reason that colored glass fascinated me.
Fast forward some decades: I hadn’t thought of that window all of those years. I had visited the site only once since my youth and don’t remember even looking at the window. Now, on a cold fall day, I was taking my publisher’s PR team on a tour of the lot where the house at 1950 Halleck Street once stood. The house had been taken by the freeway. The grape arbor was long gone. The fruit trees were gone as well.
But this time I noticed the window.
The house next door was mostly boarded up. But quite surprising for me, the window was still intact. And maybe because it is the only tangible thing that remains from my memories of a time so many years ago—but I stood in the side yard on a bitterly cold fall afternoon and stared at that milky green stained glass window.
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