This Round Goes To Me

Silas just can’t handle seeing the things that go on in front of our house. The neighbor sitting outside with her dog. The little dachshund from across the way. Squirrels. Teenagers on the sidewalk. Cars driving by. It wasn’t always this way–I have pictures of him next to the open windows up until he was about six months old. But, now all of our front windows stay under serious cover. Our floor-to-ceiling living room windows have old-fashioned metal blinds, firmly closed. Our stair landing window has one broken blind slat, so it also has a tension-mounted curtain.

Silas, however, is a smart dog.

Above my front door there are two tiny windows. If Silas sits on exactly the right stair, he can see out these two tiny windows, down to a little sliver of the sidewalk and the back edge of a parking lot.

At the back edge of that parking lot, there is a large electrical shed. Our side of that electrical shed is, apparently, the place to hide from the high school that’s on the next block. You can imagine how well this goes over with Silas, who has been increasingly obsessed with sitting on “his” stair and staring out the little windows, waiting for someone to walk by so that he can bark.

I have struggled to find a way to cover these little windows. One problem is that there is nowhere to mount any kind of curtain-hanging hardware. The other problem is our HOA, which is run by very cranky and extremely particular retirees, who, I am sure, care deeply about my window coverings.

This weekend I took a nice walk through the townhouses, looking up at people’s above the door windows. Because we have a little roof over the door and a dimly-lit hall, the only thing you can really see in anyone’s window is a dark reflection.

I trotted back home with a little joy in my step, and taped black paper over the inside of the windows.

The view from outside? A dark reflection.

The view from inside? Nothing. I really do hate to cut Silas off from the world completely, but an obsession with barking at every person who walks past our house is the opposite of helpful.

I miss my little bit of unfiltered natural light, but I do not miss Silas’s burgeoning OCD.

I have to confess, I giggled when he went to sit on his stair and realized that he couldn’t see out.