PORCHES

I love a house with porches.

My parents back porch was a nice place to sit and drink coffee in the morning.  I used to like to rest my feet on the lower porch rails and watch the mockingbird in the top of the fir tree sing and make noise and bob up and down in the very top of the tree.  The back porch looked out over my Uncle Harry's cornfield when the house was first built in the 1950's.  You could see all the way over to Nancy Dollinger's and Mr. Day's and the drive ways to Debbie Lyons house and my cousins Lew and Annette Crites.  My Uncle Harry lived next door across the cornfield and there was always a path to his house.  Woods have replaced the cornfield more than fifty years later but I bet if you walked down to the corner of the yard you could still find the path through the woods.

When my nephew Freddie was about three years old we would sit on the back porch and he'd sit on my lap and we would sing "when the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie that's amore" at the top of our lungs then we'd laugh and laugh and even though he was so little my nephew had a wonderful sense of the absurd.  We were in the country on Popes Head Road back before the Springfield Bypass was built and bisected it so there was no neighbor close enough to bother.

A pear tree grew in the middle of the backyard.  When the pears were ripe the white tailed deer would come out of the woods and eat them off the ground or from the lower branches.  Every once in a while a doe would bring her fawn and it was fun to sit on the porch and watch them.  They weren't afraid and didn't run and it was kind of magical.  One time I was sitting on the porch and I heard this commotion down in the woods and all of a sudden five or six deer came crashing out of the woods and along the side yard towards the front yard...seconds later a dog came out of the woods but it headed in the opposite direction of the deer.  I ran through the house to the front porch but the deer had run across the road into the trees on the other side into Glendalough Subdivision..

A porch swing is a wonderful thing to have.  My Grandmother in Herndon had a wonderful one on the porch of her old Victorian.  It was painted the gaudiest orange and green almost carnival ride like but it seemed to fit the style of the house.  The slats of the back were pierced and fancily cut like a doily and very comfortable.  I loved to hear it creak as we swung.  

In the evening I used to love to sit on the front porch of my house with my glass of cold tea and a good book till the lightning bugs came out at dusk.  It was too dark to read then but I liked to sit and feel the summer whisper by.