Porches

When the first breath of spring wafts into town, I inevitably wander onto our front porch where I sit and watch as the daffodils and tulips peek through the dead grass. Perfect for writing or reading or daydreaming, porches have held a special appeal for me as long as I can remember.

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My childhood home was possessed of a magical realm that daily converted from the crow’s nest of a ship to a castle tower to a space ship exploring unknown galaxies. My little sister and I lived on our front porch.

It wasn’t anything spectacular by architectural standards. The wooden floor was peeling and spongy where rainwater dripped out of the battered gutters and pooled in the corners, shaded from sunlight by the maple trees in the yard. The four posts that supported the roof were clunky and inelegant with white paint that was chalky and that rubbed off on our hands should we hold on while we stood on the sloping banisters to scout for pirates or aliens or Indians.

We often used the banisters as a perch to wave at the occasional car that passed by stirring up gravel dust or to sit and play “Old Lady Mac” or “Down, Down Baby,” clapping games that distracted me enough that one bright summer morning I fell off and knocked the wind from my lungs in the flowerbed below.

Our porch was a place of grand occasions. I received my first kiss, grieved my first death and planned my youthful foray into the waiting world right there. When my sister and I grew too old for games, I took my pretending underground and read books and books and books on our creaking porch swing. I suppose all that imagining was destined to make me fall in love with the porch, perhaps porches in general.

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One summer not too long after I moved out, my parents remodeled the porch. They poured a concrete floor, removed the old wooden banisters and replaced the posts with aluminum columns in the Doric fashion. Over twenty years later, they still strike me as oddly out of place on my parents’ small country home.

No doubt, the porch is more structurally sound than it was when I was a child. The floor is level and free of holes. My mother has stationed two wooden rockers where the porch swing used to be and has a wide array of flora flourishing along the edges in an assortment of pots and tubs. In spite of its reformation, my daughters and my nephews seemed to have had as much fun on the porch as my sister and I did. They rolled their cars and skates along the rough concrete, leapt off the open sides to roll in the soft grass below when they were old enough and have now begun to bring their own children back to toddle across the floor and watch the cows across the road.

When they tore out that wooden floor, I was sure the magic was gone forever, but I was wrong. The magic wasn’t in the wood. It was in our imaginations.

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I have my own porch now. It reminds me a little of the old one. The floor is tongue and groove and the posts wide and wooden. My husband and I toiled endlessly three summers ago, replacing rotten floor planks, painting and trimming, recovering the cushions on our wrought iron glider with red and navy plaid and finally hanging a navy blue barn star to complete the new look.

While I don’t pretend to fight dragons anymore, I have wrestled my share of monsters on our porch, but it is mostly a place of quiet. It’s the perfect place to contemplate, to rock the grandbabies, to say my prayers, and to look toward the future. It’s the place we most love to decorate at Christmas, to drape with bunting on the Fourth of July, to have our morning coffee and to eat lunch, especially in the spring when the weather turns just warm enough to sit outside, and I can steal away from school for a quick bologna sandwich.

My daughters and I watch from the porch as the grandchildren grow. They ride by on trikes and wave while their granddad follows just far enough behind to let them feel big, but close enough to catch them should our usually quiet street lure them off the broad walk. We’ve watched as they climb up the brick stairs, first holding a hand tightly and later pulling free to ascend on their own. How much more quickly childhood seems to pass with each generation.

I love a porch. It invites the people next door to talk for a bit on their way in or out, transforming them into neighbors in the truest sense, and it invites us all to stop and dream a little while, whether it’s of faraway places or the place closest to our heart.