Porches...

Claude and I have created a nice habit. After working in the yard together or separately, we will sit on the front porch with something to drink to re-hydrate and have a little visit. We each take our cell phones to catch up on text from kids or things we are working on. It is very nice to pause and visit about things we have accomplished, things we are preparing for, things happening in our family, etc. 

Last week I was inside in the morning doing the ironing for the past two week. Claude went out and spent his morning cutting grass. When he finished we sat on the front porch and visited. After a bit I asked Claude if there were front porches or porches in his family. He said they had a porch in Utah but he didn't remember much porch time. The reality is that the homes built when Claude was a kid in Utah sometimes had a front door that went into a little room with a place to hang your coat and take off you shoes. There might be another door into the living room. The homes in Muskegon, Michigan were a lot like that as well. It is because they have cold, snowy winters. These little porches offer a place to leave wet things and also keep the cold from coming straight into the house. They really help keep the house warmer.

I shared with him that our home in Shreveport had a wonderful screened in front porch, Mom had the swing that we brought from her home and Claude put on our patio on that front porch. When we were in elementary school we brought our book satchels home with left over school papers and supplies at the end of the school year. During the summer we would take those out to that front porch and play school. I remember Papa teaching me to sing harmony while he played his guitar on that front porch. I remember Papa had a thing you could put rocks in to polish them on that front porch. Lots of good memories of pausing to live a quiet evening swinging on that front porch. It is a spot that brings back good memories. Here a picture of Neffie, Junie and I playing in a rare snowstorm in Shreveport, Louisiana in 1962. The front porch is screened in behind us.

Then I shared about my grandparents, my mothers parents. They lived in an old frame home way out in the woods. No running water. No electricity. The home was what one might call a dog-trot home. There were two bedrooms on one side and a big room that was a living room/bedroom on the other side of a big wide hallway that went from the front to the back of the house. A kitchen had been added on to the other side of the living/bedroom. There were big wooden doors at either end of that long hall that could be pulled to shut up the hall. But most of the time they were open. In the afternoon, my mother would lay a big homemade quilt (we called it a pallet) on the floor of the hall and we would nap or just lay quietly to rest with a nice breeze coming through the hall. Along the front of that home was a front porch. It had Adirondack chairs and sofa, rocking chairs and a swing. I remember sitting on that porch at the end of each day. I remember shelling peas with my mother and grandmother on that porch. I remember watching my mother or grandmother iron with an old cast iron out on that porch. I remember sitting on that porch and watching it rain. Many good memories on that porch.

It was nice to sit on the porch with Claude and experience those same good feelings I had enjoyed as a child and remember the importance of porches in my life. Enjoy this picture of my mother's parents, Laura Cordelia Clark Fisch and Clarence Clifford Fisch sitting on the steps of that old porch in that home I loved so well. 

Do you have porches in your life?