Posted on August 14, 2012
I don’t have a porch. I have a deck, which is quite lovely, but it’s not a porch. From my deck you can’t see anything but a garden and the back yard. Which makes it quite private, but sometimes privacy can be highly overrated.
I want a porch. I’ve wanted one ever since I was a child of six or so and visited Aunt Did, who lived in Beaufort, South Carolina. Aunt Did’s house had a big ol’ porch, with rocking chairs and something called a “jostling board.”
Photo by Mr. T in DC
A jostling or joggling board is a South Carolina low country invention. It’s a springy board between two stands. Grownups actually allow children to bounce on a jostling board. Like Tigger.
Pretty cool, huh? I wish I’d had a jostling board when my kids were little, it would have saved the living room furniture. My kids were both very bouncy.
I understand that jostling boards are coming back into style. Hooray! But, really, a jostling board needs to go on a porch. And I live in a 1950s tract house. It’s a very nice house, but it has no porch.
Aunt Did’s porch was amazing. It wrapped around her house almost all the way. It provided a view of a busy street, and you could keep tabs on what the folks next door were up to, which, for a child with an active imagination was almost better than television.
The porch was roomy. You could play on that porch and stay cool and connected. My mother told stories of cutting “paper dolls” out of the Sears Roebuck catalog and staging elaborate weddings on Aunt Did’s porch back in the 1930s. A porch has some impressive landscape in a child’s eye.
When I got older I discovered the joy of reading in a rocking chair on the front porch at my Aunt Miriam’s river house. It was screened in, and there was always an electric fan going. It was cool out there on the porch. And I could fly away to strange and interesting places. I read Tolkein’s entire Ring Trilogy one summer and hardly budged out of the rocking chair on that porch, except to go swimming.
I think my love of porches is one of the reasons that every house in Last Chance, South Carolina, seems to come with one. If I can’t have a real porch in my suburban neighborhood, well then, I’ll just make up a place where everyone has a front porch. And, of course, everyone is keeping an eye on their neighbor – for better and worse.
Being a writer is fun that way. You can order the world to your liking.
So, do you have a porch? Post a picture of it so I can enjoy it vicariously. If not, let me know your favorite summer hang out.
