"No front porches. My uncle says there used to be front porches. And people sat there sometimes at night, talking when they wanted to talk, rocking, and not talking when they didn't want to talk. Sometimes they just sat there and thought about things, turned things over. My uncle says architects got rid of the front porches because they didn't look well. But my uncle says that was merely rationalizing it; the real reason, hidden beneath, might be they didn't want people sitting like that, doing nothing, rocking, talking; that was the wrong KIND of social life. People talked too much. And they had time to think. So they ran off with the porches." ~ Ray Bradbury Fahrenheit 451
It's September, a time of cool freshened mornings when the fog settles on the pastures and meadows like smoke before sunrise. Morning coffee on the front porch is now less a process of escaping the summer heat of the house and more about noting the last of the hummingbird visits and watching summer mellow before our eyes. Afternoon beer or cider on the front porch is about conversations with people who see us on the porch and come up to visit and chat, or perhaps just wave.
Our front porch is our sanctuary, we spend a lot of time there. It wraps around the entire front of the house. It has strewn about it, several old antique chairs - two of them rocking chairs (Ray Bradbury would approve). The various colours of sunlight - yellow, gold, red or white - stream in aslant so that everything is lit in a way that is true and luminous. Two thirds of the porch is covered, so as to enable us to sit out there protected in the rain or from the steady push of the afternoon winds. The porch at the very front of the house is not covered - splendid for staring up at the cimmerian night sky with its millions of stars and solitary changing moon, accompanied by the chorus of crickets and peepers.
The porch is much more than an entryway to our home. Instead it is a place of welcome, celebration, conversation, . . . musing. Here we met the brother of a neighbour, visiting from across the country. We sat and chatted and ate cheese and crackers and talked about when he was a secondary teacher. He left us as a new friend. Here we have hosted friends invited for wine and conversation. We never did make it inside, even as the evening closed in. Here friends and we have gravitated after a shared dinner, to share further dessert and wine. Here we have learned from people the history of our house and of our land. Here we have had long conversations with a FedEx driver about his family and his pride in his high school graduating daughter, and the things he sees on his long days of delivering all over the county.
From this porch, we have watched summer thunder storms and local parades of cyclists as they dart by in an annual race. We heard the swish of their tires and loud conversations about the beer they would have after the race and about the upcoming hill which would be a challenge. Many of them wave to us on the porch and call out good morning. From this porch we have observed the small moments of daily life - the neighbour from up the road that walks her small scruffy dog every morning; the farmer from next door that drives his tractor up and down the road, fetching bales of hay, fetching manure, fetching soil, fetching cows to move from one field to another. The pair of chipmunks that chase each other, tails poking up in the air, across our lane and up into the acacia trees; the neighbour that leads his mild and serene Guernsey up to the milking shed and back again in the mornings - steaming buckets of milk in his hands; the family of blue jays that have raucously raised their chicks on our land this summer; the neighbour that toils in her garden, her ever attentive Border collie laying in wait outside the fence. We wave at every car and truck and tractor that passes our porch. More likely than not, they waved at us first.
There is an art of porch. The art of the front porch is to understand that it is much, much more than an architectural feature of a house. It is a place - a place to pause, and to watch, and to simply be.
"Sitting on the summer-night porch was so good, so easy and so reassuring that it could never be done away with. These were rituals that were right and lasting; the lighting of pipes, the pale hands that moved knitting needles in the dimness, the eating of foil-wrapped, chilled Eskimo Pies, the coming and going of all the people . . . Oh, the luxury of lying in the fern night and grass night and the night of susurrant, slumbrous voices weaving the dark together." ~ Ray Bradbury Dandelion Wine
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