Porches

Despite having four walls and a roof, I did most of my growing up on porches. Everybody had one, even if they had to add it onto a mobile home or shotgun shanty. While the kitchen may have been the heart of the home, the porch was its soul.

I remember standing on my papaw’s porch in the first bright hours of the morning, my back arched, peeing across the rough hewn rail trying to make a rainbow. That was also where he would sit as he watched me haul a million loads of dirt around in my grandmother’s flower bed beneath the sprawling live oak tree.

It was on that porch that I would sit with Mamaw shelling peas until our fingers were sore and dyed a deep purple. It’s where Papaw taught me how to sharpen a knife and peel an apple. It’s where I figured out how to tie a shoe after hours of patient instruction about a rabbit chasing its tail through a hole. We didn’t have a pre-school; we had a porch.

I can’t speak for other places, but in the South the porch is the hub of the world. Near and far and friends and strangers converge on porch swings and rocking chairs. The porch is where folks gathered up to do their most serious chin wagging. Deals were struck, news was shared, lies were told, prayers were said, and sometimes all over a single glass of sweet tea. 

In earlier times our porches functioned as air conditioners. Instead of sitting around indoors where the stifling heat stayed boxed up, folks would lounge around on the stoop and let the cool breeze do its quiet work. It was as if the porch stood sentry against the worst of the summer heat, daring it to trespass into the shade. And I don’t think it ever got up the nerve to do so.

We would sit up until way past dark listening to the music of the frogs and the crickets and then sometimes making a bit of our own. Other times we would simply talk to one another, a lost art for sure. Papaw’s porch didn’t have unnatural light. You saw what needed seeing by the light of the moon or else you learned that sometimes listening was better than seeing anyway. Being made to slow down, sit still, and listen may have been the porch’s greatest gift to us. 

I miss days spent idling on the porch. We don’t do it as much any more. Some blame tv’s and refrigerated air, but I blame the march of progress in general. In our hurry to get to the next big thing, we have forgotten that our legs bend in the middle and that our behinds are padded for a reason. God made us for porch-sitting. Perhaps the porch is to domestic space what the Sabbath is to time, and ordered to the same purpose.

So take some time to do nothing but sit around and jaw on the porch with friends and neighbors. Lounge in the shade and rock babies or snap beans or spin yarns. Or just lean back and watch the world go by, knowing that wherever it’s going is not half as good as where you are. And don’t discount the possibility of unexpected excitement that can only be known to porch-dwellers. As Lewis Grizzard once said, “No one ever got drunk and fell off the backyard.”