Sill Work

Somewhere around nine years ago I replaced the old broken windows in the first story of our house. The first floor of our house is constructed of reinforced concrete. Not, just the foundation, but the walls. Six inches of concrete with a webbing of re-bar. The house is basically a bunker, which has it's good points and it's bad points. One of those good/bad things is the thickness of the walls. You have 6 inches of concrete, then a stud wall, and then the wallboard. Even after you shove a window in the hole, you end up with window sills that are almost 10 inches deep. Every widow on the first floor feels at bit like a porthole and sometimes I feel a bit like a medieval archer looking for enemies, but every window is also a shelf, a big shelf. Shelving everywhere, it's handy.
In the bathroom, the window is right next to the sink, which is convenient. We use that space to hold toothbrushes, hairbrushes, razors, mouthwash, and whatever else seems too troubling to put in the medicine cabinet that is right in front of our faces. We've always set things there, it just seems so natural. We've only had problems with this system two times. The first was when we first replaced the window. The old sill came out and was not immediately put back. The wide span was covered by a 2x4 right next to the window, and a 2x4 right next to the wall, and about 4 inches of space in between that dropped off into the black hole of the interior of the wall. After the second toothbrush went on a journey never to return, I was instructed to put a temporary board in place of the sill so we would stop losing things until I had the time to put a proper sill in place. I did that, and it temporarily stayed there for nine years and worked splendidly. The second problem related to the same gap around the window, but the gap on the sides. Like all houses in east Texas, we have the occasional roach. Not too many, but a few. We've put out roach motels but they've proven ineffective due to the lack of imagination on the part of their designers. Nobody seems capable of designing an opening big enough to allow for our roaches to get in. The tasty poison is there, and the roaches want to eat it, but they're shut out by their sheer bulk. It's a sad state of affairs. Because they can't be trapped by conventional means, they sometimes decide to crawl out of the walls and sit on the temporary sill, surrounded by toothbrushes and razors and what not, and look longingly out the window at the night sky. My wife wakes up early, flips on the light, and everyone has a terrible morning. It's an unfortunate clash of cultures, one that I was recently instructed to stop.
I've finally done it. I bought the wood and got out the saw and the nail gun and spent the few hours getting it all into place. It's been a bit of a pain not having that shelf to put things on for a couple of days, but I suppose it will be worth it. I'm priming the wood today, and then we can go back to using that space for proper storage. Shockingly, my wife is happy. She has the rare ability to wait out my procrastination with out wanting to smother me in my sleep. She doesn't seem to see the nine years of a temporary sill and the countless star gazing roaches in their wonder of the infinite distances of space. No, she sees a well made finished product and she's happy. To many, this is inexplicable, but I don't see a nagging wife, I only see patience. She doesn't see the maddening procrastination, only the beauty of freshly painted roach proof boards. We have found joy in each other where others would see anger.
I'm not sure that I believe in the idea that there is only one true love out there for any given person. That seems like a stretch. I do know that every now and again, through luck or fate or whatever it is, two people can come come together in a way that makes the fairy tale feel pretty damn real. It's nice.