Crazy Stable

Hold your breath. After almost 20 years, we're getting the broken stained-glass front door lights repaired.

A fellow named Peter and his assistant Frank came on the hottest day of the year to prize the poor busted panels out of their frames, first by taping them up tightly for their plastic and reconstructive surgery.  

They got them out in one piece!

For a brief while, our poor openings stood empty.
 

Here are the windows laid out on the porch. On the gurney on the way to the OR, as it were.

Then the poor "eye sockets" got the plywood treatment.

Yes, it's the look that says "Bad-Assed Warning from the National Weather Service." I insisted we paint them white outside to look less freakishly abandoned. A little better, I guess:

So this is how we'll look until the fellows at Albert Stained Glass get through releading both panels, making a template, and replicating the missing sections. We went over there today to see the panels laid out on the operating table, surrounded by dazzling sheets of every imaginable color and texture of stained glass...with a genuine Tiffany three-part scenic panel hanging a few yards away in the front window. I think they are in good hands, and that this will have been worth waiting for. If they can finish the job by Labor Day weekend and the housewarming party, then Joy Will Know No Bounds!

Oh, and inside the foyer, I wrote this on one of the plywood panels:

 It says "RESURGAM" ("I will rise again" in Latin).  It's a little tribute to an old friend of mine, now long deceased, who gave me a tour of the harbor area in Plymouth, England. He had served as an air-raid warden in WWII, when Plymouth was fiercely bombed. As we passed Plymouth Cathedral (all in one beautiful piece by the early 1980s), he described how, the morning after the Nazis blitzed it, a banner was erected across the smoking rubble with this word on it.  Great story and great spirit, Oswald James Cope, Sr...here's thinking of you!