Article October 1, 2012 Issue

Changing windowpanes

Julie Foskett

Years ago, an article in a modest little booklet titled The House with the Colored Windows packed a metaphysical wallop for my young family. We loved reading its title story, a reprinting of an article written by Virginia Haynes for the January 1, 1944, issue of the Sentinel, along with several other stories for children.

The premise of the story is that each of us lives in a house with “windows” we look through, which largely shape the nature of our daily experience. It shows how the thoughts we entertain tend to “color” these windows, sometimes gloomily in negative ways; sometimes in healthy, positive ways. And that idea has continued to inspire me over the years. 

In the story, the house has several windows, one of red glass, one yellow, one green, and one blue. And when its resident children look through these panes, the landscape takes on the color of the pane of glass through which they see it—including a red, then a green, a yellow, and then a blue horse in a nearby meadow!

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