Porch Dreams

Dear Blogging Friends:

This is a story I had published in the April/May 2010 Edition of Mary Jane Farm's magazine.  I was 45 years old at the time.  They were doing an article on various kind of spring activities and they requested a story about daydreaming on the porch.  (The pictures are something I just added today, to help give the story a little context.) 

Porches are a fixture here in my small, southern town of Ellabell, Georgia.   There are beautiful, wrap around porches, hundred year old farm houses and live oak trees; their limbs, dripping with Spanish moss.  There are humid days, where the air is heavy with heat, yet soft as cornstarch.  There are white rocking chairs, the late afternoon buzz of iridescent dragon flies and always…the promise of shade and cold, sweet tea. 

But when my dreams turn to the memory of a porch, it is one not so picturesque, not so big and beautiful, but very far away, both in place and time.  It was a 12 foot square piece of slab concrete, with two steps, that served as the entry way to my childhood home, in a residential neighborhood of Long Beach, California.    

In my memories, I am once again a little girl.  My porch dreams were lazy then, as I lay on my stomach on the cool cement, contemplating the intricacies of the small gray pill bugs that lived under the bricks. Or perhaps I would watch a line of industrious black ants, marching in formation, down the steps, around the edged lawn and out of sight.

Days were spent dreaming of living in the country and growing giant sunflowers like my Grandmother.  

Some days, I was a cowgirl on the range, riding my own talking, golden palomino, who looked just like Mr. Ed, or maybe I would be a pirate, fully equipped with a scarf and my brother’s lazy eye patch.  It was a time when the line between pretend and real, was as light, as the hazy scribble of crayon colors.

On the porch, it is a summer night, and my big brother is a teenager once again and playing his guitar in the dark.  I sit quietly behind the screen door in the shadows where he can’t see me, and watch as he strums and practices his chords.  The music mingles with the sounds of  our neighbor’s television sets, the occasional dog bark and the endless drone of the freeway. 

I sit on this same porch with my Grandpa on a Sunday afternoon, and he tells me stories of the old country.  Stories of what it was like to to leave his home in Macedonia at just 17 years old and travel to America all alone. There were stories filled with adventure, sorrow, humor, teachings and morals...all the life lessons he had accumulated and hoped I would never forget.

A few years pass and my pirate patch and six shooters, have been replaced by books.  I now long for my pre-adolescent solitude, and a place to think.  With my back against the house, I sit quietly on the shaded porch and read, and read and read.  I am the Hardy Boy’s girl cousin, who helps them solve their mysteries.  I am a hobbit, in search of the golden ring.  I am Jo March in Little Women, and my best friend is Anne Shirley, that's Anne spelled with an “e”.

Then one day, from my perch on the porch, half-hidden behind the box hedge, I watched the boy, who would one day become my husband, ride his bike, down the street and wave on his way to high school.  I can still see his thick dark hair, black jacket and back-pack, and my heart still jumps, a happy flip flop in my chest.  

It was there on the porch, when he first gave me a red rose, picked from his mother's garden. And, it was there, he first shyly held my hand.  It was there, I knew I loved him for certain, and that I always would. 

Now I am forty-five years old and I have sat on many different porches.  I have learned that home is where you make it, and giant sunflowers will bloom where they are planted.  I have learned that dreams, will follow, wherever the heart chooses to roam.

My porch in Georgia looks out over a catfish pond, where two geese; Harold and Gertrude, pretend to be swans, and glide gracefully over the water and turtles of every size and shape, warm themselves in the sun.

I sit now, with my dog on the front porch and wave at the school bus as it jangles down the dirt road, watching as a large cloud of dust rises and scatters.  I look at the all the trees, pine trees, oak trees, more trees than I ever imagined seeing in one place.  I listen to the wind, blowing through their branches and it sounds like the sea.

My hours spent on the porch have helped to mold me into the woman I am today.  A woman, not so very different from the girl I was.  I am still dreaming and reading.  Still looking from home, outward into the world with wonder.  Listening for sage voices and following the call of my pirate’s heart.

Do you have a porch memory you would like to share?

What does your porch look like?

Have a happy Tuesday

Love, Delisa