On the porch

While I am grateful for the near-ubiquity of air conditioning – I'm not a hot/humid person by constitution – I dearly enjoy sitting outside in an Adirondack chair or "granny rocker" on the front porch, even on hot days. Almost always there is a fragment of breeze that helps cool a sweaty brow.

As a very young girl, I spent time on my grandparents' front porch in Fairhaven, Mass. I'd sit in Grandma's lap and we'd rock.. rock... rock. Neighbors would stop on their way up the street, and everyone would catch up on the town gossip. During the Hurricane of '54, Grandpa and I stood on that porch in our slickers and watched firemen in rowboats paddling up and down the flooded streets. The porch was like a reverse stage, a balcony where we watched things happen. We saw and were seen. I have loved that prospect ever since.

All of the five houses Michael and I have owned in 34 years have had front porches or decks; it's one of those requirements I have for my living space. For two years while Michael finished his PhD we rented a really nice, big second-floor apartment in Providence. But there was no porch, and I felt trapped, hemmed-in, cut off from life at street level. I vowed we would never again live somewhere without same-floor access to the outdoors.

Front porches seemed to have been favored on both sides of my family. Photo albums hold many a sepia image of great-great ancestors on porches, like the German-Americans photographed, above, in St. Louis early in the last century. The woman on the right was my maternal great-grandmother, Elizabeth Brune Girthofer. When it was hot, the women would sit and rock in the evenings and cool themselves with pleated paper fans adorned with Japanese motifs – peonies, kimono-clad ladies, cranes.

I have a few of Grandma's paper fans still, but they feel overly dainty in my big strong hands, relics of a time when ladies bathed and powdered themselves on hot days, then sat in fresh, light dresses on the porch with glasses of homemade lemonade. I'm a shorts-and-tank-tops gal myself, broad-shouldered like my dad's side of the family, tall, solid, outdoorsy. Filmy dresses and flowered fans really aren't my style – or anyone else's in this day and age. But porches – ah, they will never go out of fashion, thank God.

Late this hot afternoon, Kevin and I walked down our road to the beach and went swimming as the evening tide surged in. The water was just right – cool enough to be refreshing, warm enough not to shock my body as I walked into the low surf. We floated and bobbed for a half-hour, luxuriating in the cool waves and the bay views, then returned home and sat on the front porch, me in the Adirondack chair, Kevin on the railing. The air was still heavily warm, but my wet bathing suit and a slight breeze cooled me. Mumbling bees and the bright tissue-paper wings of excited butterflies darted around the flowering plants to my left; our just-turned 17 son, tall and strong and suddenly manly, lazed to my right. There really wasn't anywhere else I wanted to be.

Thanks to Neil for the inspiration.