Wherein Grandpa Dave has a great idea

As you remember, when I was young, we were very poor and lived in a refrigerator box.  I told you about Sunday dinners and how I had some chores to do for those..

Have you ever seen a refrigerator box?  It's like a shoe box, but as big as a refrigerator.  Grandpa Dave had cut a door in one end so we could get in and out, but that was the only opening in it.

Having no openings, it was very dark in the dining room.  We couldn't afford candles, so one of my chores on Sunday was to take a bucket outside, fill it with sunshine and bring it into the dining room.  It took a lot of buckets of sunshine to fill the dining room, and the dining room was pretty far away from the door.  You had to go out of the dining room, through the family room, down the hall to the vestibule* and out the door.

Did I mention that the refrigerator box was bigger on the inside than on the outside?

Anyway, it was lots of work.  One Sunday, I had the dining room about a third full of sunshine, when Grandpa Dave walked in and felt sorry for me and all the work I had to do.  He said, "What if I cut you a small door above the floor, so you can just reach outside, grab a bucket full, and dump it in here?"

I liked that idea a lot.  So he did.

When he opened the little door, sunlight started spilling into the dining room and pretty soon, the room was full.  I couldn't have been happier.

As we ate, bugs and wind came in, which we didn't like.  Grandpa Dave put a sheet of glass over it to keep the wind and bugs out.

I said, "Hey!  We can see out of it like we do our eyes, and it keeps the bugs out.  Let's call it a bugeye."

Grandpa Dave said, "Bugs already have eyes.  Let's call it a windeye... nah, that sounds odd.  Window."

Pretty soon, our friends and neighbors saw how convenient it was not to have to carry sunshine into their dining rooms, and they put them in, too.

And today, everyone uses windows.

* In our family we have a ... well, not a tradition, probably more like a condition, of making up words.  For years, the kids thought we'd made up the word "vestibule."  One of them was astonished the first time he heard it from someone besides us.  Heh!