The Porch – Part 1

THE PORCH
Part 1
A Short Story By Golden Keyes Parsons

I was only three years old the day I dashed up the steps of the porch and burst into the parlor to peer into a dark mahogany cradle. My baby brother blinked his unfocused, newborn eyes at me and nestled down inside the folds of a soft blue blanket. My mother smiled. The shadows from the gathering dusk danced through the trees and landed on the faces of my mother and brother. Life was good.

It was a wrap-around porch that had been repainted so many times that the current in-vogue color clung to chipped remnants of yesteryear coats. Hanging baskets of Boston fern swung gently in the early evening breeze and wrought iron plant stands groaned under a heavy load of clay pots, brimming with red, pink and white begonias, impatiens and petunias. Lilac bushes lined the railing on the sides of the porch and threatened to overtake the flowerbeds every spring with their profuse, fragrant purple blossoms. No one really cared. The lavish beauty of the bushes earned their tenured place in the garden.

Before the advent of air conditioning and television, the porch was a gathering place for the family to cool off after supper with a glass of iced tea. The architectural style of porch was what the younger generation built onto their new suburban homes, a “wrap-around porch,” hoping to recapture the ambiance of a gathering place. But the frantic families of today simply rush across the reconstructed porches on the way from their air-conditioned houses to their air-conditioned cars to dine at the latest air-conditioned casual dining restaurant.

My grandmother lived with us and spent most of her days on the porch when weather permitted. She rocked back and forth in the creaking wicker rocker, expounding on life and crocheting blankets for whichever new baby was currently expected in the small rural town. I sat in the porch swing, played with my paper dolls and half listened to her recitations while I swung as high as I dared. The capricious swing concealed hidden danger and dumped the occupant unexpectedly if one swung too high. I learned that lesson the hard way.

In the wintertime, our sleds rested against the door on the side of the porch. On bright crystal mornings when we awoke to fresh snow, we tumbled down the stairs, pulled on our snowsuits and mittens, grabbed the sleds off the porch and ran to the hill behind our house to be the first to test the slope. Without fail, my mother called after us to be careful to not plunge into the creek at the end of the run. After a morning of skidding sideways toward the bottom of the hill, squealing with half-terror and half-glee as we avoided hurtling over the bank into the icy water, we trudged back to the porch, dragging our sleds behind us. Wisps of hot chocolate vapor beckoned to us from white porcelain cups lined up on the counter as we threw our snow gear into a wet pile on the floor beside the kitchen door.

One spring afternoon after the winter thaw, I walked home from school and sat on the rough, splintery front steps of the porch. Holding my glasses on my nose with my finger, I became lost in a story from my latest library book. The banging of the screen door awoke me from my fantasy world as my mother ran past me, screaming and crying, to the pastor’s house across the street. I stood, my reader tumbling unnoticed into the flowerbed beside the steps. I walked to the low window on the front of the porch and peeked into my grandmother’s bedroom. She lay still, too still, face down in her pillow. I froze beside the window and watched in little-girl, wide-eyed wonder at the parade of people dashing in and out of the house—up and down the steps of the porch. I sat down in her rocking chair and became aware of a Presence that came and stood behind me. I felt arms of comfort around me. I picked up my grandmother’s latest woolly project and smelled it. The jasmine fragrance of her toilet water lingered in the soft threads. I wished I’d listened more carefully to her life lessons.

Not long after that, I began to keep a diary like all my pre-teen girlfriends. But I only wrote in my diary when I was in the porch swing. I wrote of the turbulence of pubescent emotions. I wrote of hurts and wounds from friends. I wrote about the Presence that I felt when I listened in the silence of the early morning or shadowy twilight. I found a loose board around the corner, on the side of the porch, behind one of the plant stands, and kept the diary in a tin box, hidden from my little brother’s prying eyes.

I abandoned my coke-bottle-bottom glasses and matured into a teenager. Boys began to hang around the porch—leaning their bikes against the railing, then parking their cars out front.

Some mustered the courage to amble onto the porch and sit in the swing with me until evening turned into the murky cover of darkness. My father would flip on the light if I stayed on the porch too long in the nightfall. I experienced the surprise of the flood of emotions that came with my first kiss while sitting on the porch. Many kisses followed from many different boys. Declarations of forever after were etched into the armrest of the swing, and I truly believed every one of them.

One day I brought to the porch a special young man I met on a blind date in college. I shared with him my secrets that lay hidden in the corners and crevices of the porch—the whispers that tarried in the creaking of the swing and the rustle of the lilac bushes; the wisdom that had fallen from my grandmother’s lips and how I wished I could remember more of what she’d said to me; my diary and its hiding place…

(Come back and visit next week to read PART TWO on the blog.)

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