What is so special about a porch?

The photograph that accompanies this post is the view from the back door of the first porch I ever fell in love with. It was the porch of my childhood home on Lake Lawrence in southeastern Illinois. Today, the porch is gone. These stairs are not the same stairs that were there the first time I stood and looked down at the beach. Those stairs were made of halved railroad ties, embedded into the side of the hill at a distance far enough apart that my little legs strained to reach one to the next. And that bannister is nothing less than a masterpiece that I remember my dad building. He was quite proud of it. He even wired it up so that dock lights ran the length of the railing and then were strung through the trees that lined the beach back then, where my wooden push swing hung. My mom planted purple irises along the stairs, evenly spaced from the top of the hill to the bottom. I can still remember what they smelled like on hot summer days, as I made my way to the water. The colored dock lights are long gone, but the dead wires remain, ghosts of summers past. All that’s left of the porch today is the concrete pad, broken and cracked in spots. The house is gone, too. But I can still see it there, still remember its smell, and the sound the screen door made as it slammed shut each time we ran in and out, in and out, all day long.

When my mom, dad, little sister, and I returned to the Midwest from Los Angeles, California and moved into that house, I was only three years old, and the year was 1984. It was my mom’s family’s summer cabin, which had been in her family for long enough that she and her siblings had spent their summers there when they were growing up, as well. And it was where I would grow up playing with my sister and our bazillion cousins. We had a huge outdoor patio and a screened in front porch where my mom’s siblings and their families often joined us on summer weekends. These spaces were my favorite places, the places where I was safe, in our yard, but free outdoors to run and play and jump and dance and sing and be a kid.

There, I learned to ride a bicycle, steer a Roller Racer, drive a Cozy Coupe Little Tykes car, master the roller-skates, and where I learned the importance of NOT pogo-balling on a picnic table. It was where my sister and I spent countless hours drying off in swimsuits and playing with the neighbor kids and our visiting cousins. It was the first place I ever cupped my hands and held a wild animal, a little black and yellow salamander. It was where I waited anxiously while my dad baited my homemade fishing pole in the evenings to take me fishing down at the dock. It was where I learned to gently catch lightning bugs and set them free, and it was where I roamed and explored the world, fell down and scraped my knees and elbows, and learned the art of getting back up and moving on.

The porch was where I accidentally opened the door of the cage of our family’s beloved Yellow Headed Amazon Parrot, Percy, and watched in astonishment as he took flight and sailed over the roof of our house, out over the lake, eventually coming to rest on the surface of the water at the sandbar about thirty yards out from our dock. And I stood and watched from that patio as my mom raced down the steps to the beach, kicked off her shoes, dove straight into the water with all of her clothes on, and swam as fast as she could to retrieve the grumpy bird. It is where we said goodbye to our old mutt “We-Dog” after she passed away, and where we witnessed the incredible birth of our cat Julie’s kittens, where we cradled them in our arms and marveled at their cuteness together in the days ahead.

It never occurred to me that part of the reason this outdoor space played such a huge role in our lives was because we did not have air conditioning (and wouldn’t for several years) and that we owned a television set but rarely ever sat down to watch it, mostly because at that time cable was not yet available at Lake Lawrence, and in order to get any channels to come in, someone often had to stand just-so and hold the “rabbit ear” antennae at just exactly the right angle in order for us to get a clear picture. I just knew it was our family’s space, where we carried on the business of being a family together.

As I sat down and began writing this piece, I Googled “porch sitting” out of curiosity. I was surprised at the results. I had no idea that houses in Florida were required to have front porches at one point in time, before the invention of air conditioning, as an area where families could gather together to cool off and socialize with the neighbors. As these became popular staples in neighborhoods, more people across the country began building them on their homes. In the evenings, families would sit together and visit with neighbors. It added an element of, not only socialization, but also security to a neighborhood, as it was proven to lower crime rates, with porch sitters serving as a line of defense, sets of eyes and ears all over the neighborhood, keeping their thumbs on the pulse of their communities.

When the pandemic arrived in March, 2020 in our little sleepy town, I longed for warm weather and sunny days. And as those arrived, my family, without even meaning to, moved our activities out onto the porch of the giant American four-square house where we were living in Old Town, Vincennes. We do have air conditioning and television now, but there was something about being able to go outside, the chance encounters with neighbors on morning, afternoon, evening walks—the opportunity to socialize safely, from a distance, but still being able to make those important human connections, to remind ourselves that we were all in the pandemic together, no matter how far apart we had to stand. My daughter and her friends had socially distanced porch parties, during which they had Bobe’s pizza delivered to the front steps and watched movies together spread across the porch. We visited with our parents on the porch, in lawn chairs and old-fashioned wooden rockers. We ate dinners on the porch. We orchestrated our daughter Taylor’s high school graduation ceremony and “open house” from the safety of that porch. We held a small, intimate, going-away party for our beloved Japanese exchange student, Miyu, on that porch. I taught internet college courses, read books, and occasionally took naps on the porch. I kept an eye on the neighborhood, learned more about the world there, and as a result, I was reminded of all of the myriad reasons I love porches.

In late May of 2020, as the pandemic dragged on, my family rented a house in Florida for the summer, near my sister and her family. And there, too, we had a front porch, a tiny porch with a little two-seater table. I hung fairy lights and enjoyed evenings reading or talking on the phone or chatting with neighbors, listening to the cicadas and crickets and frogs sing on that front porch, too. And as I was joined on that porch by my daughter, as the wooden screen door whined open and clapped shut with a bang, I was transported back to that porch of my childhood, back to Lake Lawrence, back to the simplicity and beauty of learning how to navigate the world from the safety of a porch.

And so I knew I wanted to bring the porch with me into my writing. It is my favorite place to write, of course. But when the pandemic shocked the world, I found myself sitting on my porch, on friends’ porches, even on strangers’ porches with them a time or two, and I saw something wonderful happening. I saw people stopping and taking time to be people together, uninterrupted, sharing their humanity, bearing their souls, laughing, crying, singing, playing music, eating, but most of all, being humans and recognizing and celebrating one another’s humanity. Parts of this year 2020 I do actually hope to take into the future with me, parts of this year when we have been learning lessons we could not possibly learn any other way. I want to take these experiences with me and continue them—and to do that, I’m going to share them here with you.