This is a Love Letter to My Front Porch

This porch was not always pink, nor chipped the way it has come to be. It used to be white with a swinging bench that hung from the ceiling and barrels of flowers sat out in the rain and snow. At one end where the driveway met the green grassy hill that leads up to our house was the cracked cement that brought you to this porch. On the other end was a slab of concrete with our initials dried and carved with a heart. It was a small jump to make to that slab from the porch so often we’d have guests sit and hang their legs off to the side. 

The swing eventually vanished for a good reason I can’t recall because I was a child who didn’t care about why we got rid of it as much as the fact something fun was lost. What came to be was a copper sun that sat between two wicker chairs, but those too got too old to be outside. Then one afternoon we came home to this porch painted pink by my father. As it got older and the four seasons washed away his work we eventually had this sanctuary caught in the veil of a sunbeam before it sinks too far below the trees which surround my house. 

I did not always love the porch, I just didn’t care about it. I cared more about the swing my dad put on a tree so tall I created the folktale that he’d stacked two ladders one on top of the other to tie it to its last thick branch. I cared about the rare “Big Puddle” so titled by my sister and me, which happened near the swing when the rain was too quick and the earth beneath couldn’t drink fast enough. 

I do, however, love it now. I went away to college and came back to something I couldn’t conceive more beautifully. They do not have pink porches in New York city. They have rusted fire escapes, if that, and white or black roofs which you can or cannot lay on. 

I am also a lover of mornings and berries, hot cups of tea even in summer, wine, the sound of wind through the trees, the lone life of the first one awake anywhere in the world, and the fine hour in summer where everyone seems to be asleep because they were in the sun all day drained by its heat and the world gets quiet in the specific way the extra sunlight makes us contemplative. All of these have everything to do with the porch that paint is chipped and settles between my fingers as I peel it off. I spent many mornings getting dressed early only to sit outside or simply staring out at five AM when I woke too early for even my mother to be waiting downstairs. I’d go outside then and stick my feet in the grassy dew and walk away with slippers made of lawn. I’d listen to the joggers you’d hear coming down the road before you saw them round a corner. I’d read until the sun was too fierce and it felt too excruciating and even the berries I’d have for breakfast sagged in the weight of the air.

At 21 I had one last summer at home left in me, which I spent almost entirely on this porch. I had been told by this man I loved that we might not see each other again. Then I left for the isle of beaches and beach houses of where I’d grown up and for which the culture of life was entirely different than that of New York. I had the suspicious feeling this would not be the case, but I couldn’t be sure the last time was not the last so in an uncertain state and the mildness of June I waded like a swimmer ill-prepared to return to the shore only on that very porch with books. I finished three books in a week and a half my last summer home. 

Before I could finish the third book early one morning, but not too early I was alone, we discovered my mother’s best friend had died. We knew she was going we simply did not know when. I was sad as I had known her all my life. I remembered seeing her dog had gotten loose, Daisy, and stepping out on the porch to watch my father get her back. I remember the times she’d stand and talk with my mother after their meetings, especially if it were spring, in a denim shirt and her sunglasses pushed up into her sandy hair. 

A day after her wake I started my third book in those 10 days and my dad sat outside with me on the porch. There were bugs, but they weren’t biting yet. It was still early and the light hadn’t been turned on to cause a swarm and we both listened to cars go by. I was newly 21 but no one would drive me to the package store for wine.

“Why don’t you walk down? There’s a new one on main street.” 

I didn’t have my license yet. So I walked along the rich green of earth until I made it to main street and walked all the way home with my book in my hand occasionally looking up for summer traffic. 

My father and I sat outside after he opened the bottle for me because I always shredded the cork. My parents didn’t drink anymore, but he sat with me and finished one of a dozen so cups of tea he always had no matter the weather or mood. I can’t remember what we talked about, I think about my mother’s friend and the book I was reading. I do know that I felt I was living a moment that could never be accurately capture. The way some photos don’t do the justice and words are not the right art. Where no medium can convey the swell of emotions of this once insant you love and so you can only memorize it for later. I was glad I was with my father while the sound of my mother cooking chicken of some sort reverberated through the kitchen window and wrapped back round to meet us at the warm porch. 

Even in the time to follow, spring break, summer, fall, I tried to make time to sit on the porch even if it didn’t involve reading. Sometimes it’s nice just to see the state of the world from a specific vantage point of your own home. 

When I was with my mother out there we’d talk about boys or about feeling sad. Sometimes we’d talk about the desire to peel the whole pink thing up and paint it so it wouldn’t ever chip again. Sometimes we didn’t talk at all. We’d sit with our iced or hot drinks made by us or a barista uptown and we’d enjoy the time of year where being inside felt like the waste of the world. 

I’d be asleep in my room for a nap and hear my brother distinctly in his boots come up slapping the wood and entering tired as he ever was. I’d rise to go downstairs just to tell him a few good jokes because we’d spent a lot of time apart since he was seven years older than me. Sometimes though he too would be on the porch with us sledding to the edge of our yard telling us exactly if we ever needed to roll off the sled because we were getting too close to the road. Outlining the point of ejection and yelling from its edge too if we got close. 

I love my childhood home I think its made for early fall, late spring, and early summer. Yet those 25 slabs of wood that extend the horizon of our house known as a front porch are a means of sanctuary for me. Spending time out there reading feeling like a real person in this world. There isn’t a person who I have not found time with on that porch. Ex-boyfriends who danced with me under its light and kissed me goodnight, aunts who drank coffee under it, grandmas who took photos of us in handmade matching bathing suits for the 4th of July. 

This is a love letter to her, the porch. If I could carve this into her without damage I would. When the warm spring break rolls up over the avenues of New York to my doorstep, I will have to read this to her as I have with many books to her sighing relief. I leave those parts of me there, the stories we remember and tell. Few people have yet to see the wonderful beauty of a pink chipped painted porch. I imagine them there with love. She is why I love to write about mornings because I have seen almost every good one from her perspective. She is the foundation for many poems the structure and framework to good memories.

When the morning comes in New York or the late afternoon in the break of heat where I climb out to my fire escape and swing my legs from between the bars I hope she can sense me and finds the traces of her image within.