Time for Front Porch Visits

True luxury is being able to own your time - to be able to take a walk, sit on your porch, read the paper, not take the call, not be compelled by obligation. ~Ashton Kutcher

Do you have a front porch? I grew up in a house with a front porch. We didn't have chairs on it. That would have gotten in the way of our rollerskating fun. It was the only slab of concrete around and my sister and I rollerskated for miles and miles on it while dreaming of sidewalks and blacktopped lanes that we could skate on to who knows where. But while we didn't have anything on our porch for sitting, my grandfather's house had a porch made for sitting and visiting awhile. 

There was a swing on one end. I can still here the sound of the chains groaning a little as we eased the swing back and forth with our feet. On the other end, itchy vines grew up strings to shade a two-seater wooden porch rocker. My grandfather's chair was a green metal one that had a spring to it when you sat down. Then another of those two-seater wooden rockers. Plenty of places for you to sit and for the neighbors to come rest a while in the shade and catch up on the news. 

I remember sitting on that porch breaking beans and hulling limas. My grandfather always kept a flyswatter in his hand to chase kill flies in between his nodding off dozes. He was already well into his eighties when I remember him best. I wish I had known what to ask him so he'd tell me stories, but he wasn't much for talking. There were a few neighbors who stopped by from time to time and were much for talking. I remember swinging and listening.

That porch is where I had my first case of extreme dog yearning love at around age eight or nine. My aunt, who lived with my grandfather, took in a black Cockerspaniel that had been dropped on our road, and all summer I walked to her house every day to see that dog. He would get up beside me in that two-seater rocker and lay his head in my lap. I loved that dog. I'll have to tell you his whole story another day. But I spent a lot of time on my grandfather's front porch that year rubbing Inky's ears.

A few years after my husband and I got married, we were able to build a new all modern conveniences house. It was ten times warmer in the winter than the old farmhouse where we had been living. We didn't have to draw water. Just turn a faucet. We had wall to wall carpeting. There was something almost amazing about getting up in the morning without your feet hitting cold floors, but carpet. It was good. But there was no porch - front or back. 

My husband, who moved around a lot as a kid, lived in some old farmhouses that had great porches. He's always believed a house needs a porch. Or maybe that a man needs a porch to sit on to take a rest and watch the end of the day happening. 

We still don't have a porch, buteventually we did add on a front and back deck. The next best thing to a porch, I suppose. Not so good in the rain or extra hot sunshine, but still a place for a rocker and a glider. A place for a hummingbird feeder and a tinkling wind chime. A place for flowers. A place to see and dream about the leisure of sitting on a porch. Sometimes a place to sit and enjoy the last little bits of the day.

I see front porches all the time when I'm driving through some of the older neighborhoods and some of the newer ones too. The furniture looks comfy. The shade looks deep. The only thing missing are the people. Maybe they're all sitting on their back porches. But I often think that we make our porches and our decks to match a dream of leisurely afternoons and then we never capture those precious hours for sitting and maybe reading a book or doing nothing but wait for a neighbor to come calling. 

What do you think? Do you love porches? Do you have a porch? If you do or ever had a porch, what are some of your front porch memories?

This Old House - Saying Goodbye

"He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery." ~Harold Wilson

Things change. That's the one thing in life you can be sure will happen. Maybe not every day, but then again maybe every day. Sometimes we want to hold time in a bottle and keep the world from changing for a little while, but we can't. The sun comes up and goes down. The seasons change. Children become adults. New babies are born. To everything there is a season and throughout it all the one everlasting constant is that things change. 

The top picture is the homeplace being torn down - its logs showing for the first time in well over a hundred years. I don't know how old the original house is. The second picture is the way the house looked in I'm guessing the 1930's or 40's, with some of my great aunts in the yard. You can see the front porch behind them where many afternoons were spent visiting, perhaps breaking beans or shelling peas. My grandfather sat on this porch during his last years, a flyswatter in his hand to kill the pesky flies. My children swung on the porch swing "high as the moon" and sometimes off to dreamland. Inside are even more memories. Overnight visits almost every Friday with my beloved aunt. Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners with little salt cellars at every plate. It's where I first touched the keys of a typewriter. It's where my children came later to spend the nights with their beloved granny and granddad after my aunt passed on. A memory not only in every room, but in every board of every wall, every wooden step. And now the house has been sold. The new owners had it inspected. The house was condemned and is being torn down. Change can make a person's heart hurt.  

I stopped the other night to ask the new owners if I could take some pictures. So even though seeing the house meeting its end is sad for me, I also found the log structure that had been revealed fascinating. Look at the rows of rocks carefully placed between the logs like a miniature rock fence before the builders added the chinking. I can imagine the men building this, sawing down the trees that surely were growing so majestically in this place before the settlers came and began clearing them away to grow crops and build houses like this one. This house was bigger than many I have seen in history books, and it would have taken several men to get the logs in place. It was built with care and skill and has lasted maybe two centuries or near to it. But all things change. 

"Action and reaction, ebb and flow, trial and error, change - this is the rhythm of living. Out of our over-confidence, fear; out of our fear, clearer vision, fresh hope. And out of hope, progress." ~Bruce Barton

Progress can't be stopped. The new owners deserve a nice house on their property. The house being gone won't make the memories disappear. It'll just make the family, at least those of us left, who lived there and made those memories a little sad. 

Does change sometimes make you sad?