Have you seen this “life lesson” floating around on Facebook? A young wife keeps commenting about her neighbor’s dirty laundry–literally. The neighbor is constantly hanging up dingy sheets on the clothesline to dry. The wife wonders why the neighbor can’t seem to learn how to get her laundry clean, until her husband washes the window and voila! The neighbor’s sheets become white and clean. All along it was the windows that were filthy dirty. See what happened there? The wife was being so judgmental about the neighbor’s laundry when she should have been cleaning up her own house.

Every time I read that story (a lot of my Facebook friends apparently think it’s a good lesson) I think about my dirty windows–literally. On sunny days in November, I kept thinking I should wash my windows, especially the bay windows in front of the house along with my kitchen windows. These are the windows we look out of most frequently, and they are very dingy! November was such a beautiful month this year; warm and sunny. It was a very unusual November for Chicago, and it would have been the perfect time to wash my windows.

And yet, between Lily’s birthday and Thanksgiving, November flew by. It’s December already. The first couple days of December were cold, but still fall-like. Yesterday, however, the view out my windows changed drastically.

And I thought to myself, a bit belatedly, CRAP. I guess I won’t be washing these windows this week. There’s really no lesson here, unless it’s about my own laziness. I should have been “making hay while the sun shines” or something like that. The best I can hope for now is that we have a mild, sunny day in December. Who knows? It might happen. Otherwise my dingy windows will have to wait ’til Spring.

Just don’t judge me by my dirty windows, and I won’t judge you by the way you wash your sheets!