The Porch – Part 2

THE PORCH

Part 2 (Click HERE to Read Part 1)

A Short Story By  Golden Keyes Parsons

He proposed to me on the porch, and we married soon after. The wedding was at our church, but we celebrated the reception at the house and greeted our guests on the porch. My parents hired a professional landscaper for the occasion and, of course, the porch boasted a brand new coat of paint—white this time. Honeysuckle twirled around the posts of the porch and lilies of the valley poked from every bare spot along the railings. We fled down the steps of the porch to our honeymoon.

He was drafted and went to war just months after we married. I was pregnant and went back home to live with Mom and Dad while he was overseas. I pulled my diary from the hiding place and wet its pages with my tears of loneliness. Sitting in the porch swing, I began to journal again. I started a baby blanket, a safe yellow, as I rocked in the same chair where my grandmother had crocheted dozens of them.

One morning I heard heavy footsteps on the porch. I peered through the curtains and saw the glint of a military belt buckle. My mother answered the soft knock and went out on the porch to speak with them. I stepped to the screen door, dazed at the horrible news I knew they had to deliver. I collapsed into the arms of the military chaplain as we stood huddled on the porch.

Clusters of family and friends gathered on the porch speaking in hushed tones after the funeral. I moved numbly among them and ended up by myself in the swing, fingering the long forgotten carvings on the wooden arm. I wanted everybody to leave so I could pull my journal out of its hiding place and escape in the safety of the familiar pages. I wanted the Presence to come and take this wrenching heartache away.

I brought our son home to the porch, rested him in the same mahogany cradle that had cuddled my baby brother. I swung him in the same porch swing that I had swung in as a little girl. Life had hard edges to it now, and I didn’t know how to get around them without scrapes and wounds. I knew one thing, though. I knew I would stay, at least for a while, with my parents, and watch my son play on the porch.

My father died of a heart attack that fall while he was raking the burnished red maple leaves that carpeted the front yard every year. He made it up the steps of the porch before he collapsed. My mother tried to give him CPR as I called the ambulance, but it was too late. He was already gone. The paramedics, all of whom we knew—some childhood friends who had congregated on the porch through the years—wiped tears from their eyes as they carried my father down the steps of the porch on a gurney.

Now my mother needed me as much as I needed her, so we stayed together in the house, the Presence on the porch enveloping us in invisible arms.

Somehow I never got around to remarrying. I always intended to do so, but it never seemed to be the right time or the right man. Oh, plenty of suitors came and went, both for my mother and myself. They stood on our porch, and sat in our swing, but the years flew by, and I was busy raising my son and working. A new marriage just never seemed to fit.

I watched my son dig in the flowerbeds beside the porch and, when he got older, watched him grab his sled from the side and race to the snow-covered hill. I heard myself sound exactly like my mother as I called after him to be careful of the creek at the end of the run. I rushed to his side when the old swing dumped him on the hard wooden floor. We had birthday parties with clown cupcakes and cakes with baseball players and scavenger hunts that always ended up on the porch. I watched as girls began to come onto the porch to sit with my son in the swing.

Then he was off to college and married soon after graduation. He brought my grandbabies back to my lap, and I rocked them in the old wicker rocker on the porch.  My mother and I sat on the porch in the dusky evening and looked at each other with increasingly wrinkled eyes and wondered where the years had gone. We would stand at the railing of the porch and watch for the headlights of my son’s car to pull in the driveway for Thanksgiving or Christmas or Easter.

A few more years and then she was gone. And I was alone. Perhaps I should have remarried. Now the candidates were too few, and romance for me, seemed more a bother than a joy.

I know it’s simply the silly musings of an old lady, but I still journal when I sit on the porch. And I still leave it on the porch. Not in the hiding place anymore, but in a drawer in a table beside a new wicker rocker. How many journals have I filled? Will anyone even care to read them when I’m gone? I pick up my current journal and pen, and I rock and listen to the neighborhood noises in the evening.

There are no children anymore—riding their bikes on the sidewalks and calling out to one another, “Watch this!” Our community is growing old, like the houses, and the young ones are moving away. The occasional whir of a lawnmower breaks into the cricket concert, but most of the time the twilight hours are quiet.

My pen falls out of my hand and clatters onto the floor of the porch. Why don’t I pick it up? I sit in the swing and look at myself in the rocker and wonder if my son will remember me as a brunette. I am so gray. I didn’t realize my hair was that gray. I urge the familiar swing into gentle motion and realize that someone will come soon and find me in the rocker on the porch.

I wonder what I should do. May I leave before they come for me? Even before the question is fully formed in my mind, a peaceful Presence sits down beside me on the swing and wraps a comforting arm around my shoulder. “It’s time to leave the porch,” he whispers. I nod and stand up and let Him guide me down the steps. An indescribable velvet cloak of peace surrounds me. I turn and bid a final farewell to the porch.

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