Wide windowsills have always brought me comfort. This began when I was a small child and we would visit my Grandma Sarah in her tiny apartment in the Bronx. On the car ride from our home in Virginia, I would be picturing my Russian Jewish grandmother’s wide kitchen windowsill waiting to welcome my brother and me with two large glasses of milk and a plate of black and white cookies.

Even though we only got to New York a couple of times a year, depending on what family member was getting married or having a bar mitzvah, there was something so safe about that wide windowsill in that small kitchen. My grandmother, with her silky white hair pulled back in a bun, rocking me on her lap while she kissed me on my head and called me her Pat-a-la.

As a young woman, I took a try at replicating that experience when I moved to a small apartment with a wide windowsill in Greenwich Village. The window of the third-floor walk-up faced West 10th Street and I could see the Empire State Building in the background.

Before I had any furniture, I used the windowsill as a dining table. Initially, I sat on it with my plate in my lap. Then I graduated to a folding chair where I could actually sit and use the sill as a table as I ate with a view of New York’s grandest building.

When Scarlet O’Hara, the white Siamese cat with one blue and one brown eye, came into my life she would curl up at the edge of my “table” and keep me company in hopes of a scrap from my plate.

Tonight, as I sit in my daughter’s apartment, where I am bunking until my house is safe to move back into after the Eaton fire in Altadena, I am cocooned by the wide windowsills that house her books and artifacts. It’s a safe place. A glass of milk and a black and white cookie and I’ll be just fine.

Email patriciabunin@sbcglobal.net and follow her at PatriciaBunin.com.