Heat is Where the Home Is

Friday, leaving the office it was so quiet I could listen to the breeze in the leaves all around me.  Hot.  It’s that time of year, here, where everything is lushly green, where the grass is just getting ready to turn brown and dry.  This time of year, too, my sense of connection to that place, that land so close to the swamps, the suburb, where I grew up, is at its height.  The heat of June, the scent of mimosa; asphalt; chlorinated pool water.  Incredible dry pain when you step on a holly leaf left over from winter.  Soft, tender green leaves still coming in, too.  You can hear the shouts, from the neighborhood pool, up the street.

You feel, in summertime, how close this place is both to the tidewater, and to the piedmont.  The hills suddenly apparent.  Because, in summertime--we were *outside*.  Summer was the time I, at least, was really at all aware of the land, the country, the *air* all around us.  I was barefoot every day - toes actually part of the dust and earth and clay.  In soft, cool grass which over the season slowly became dusty, prickly.

The evenings become what my dad always called "soft nights" - dusk is cat-footed, gentle, slow, glowing.  Lightning bugs.  Scent of gardenia, now, wafting off my neighbor's incredible bank of green and glossy leaves.  Beautiful.

I sit outside and look to my right - on a stoop of concrete, with broken brick stairs - and a yard almost uninterrupted, by curves, by trees, by flower beds, by features.  I put my eyes on a certain spot, I look at the back of the house, and I build it again.  MY dream porch.

We grew up with porches - at first, a gravel patio, when we were very young.  Dad had a concrete patio poured one year.  Big, white spot.  We'd eat outside.  There's  a picture of me with our dog - another one, of my feet, sticking out of a big appliance box.  I was inside, in the shadow - reading, I like to suspect.  Reading B.C. comics, or MAD magazine.  But reading.

Then, the best of all - dad built a porch on top of the large patio.  Low brick walls.  I remember how that looked.  I think he turned forty before the roof was up - have this memory of neighbors and his party, sitting on those comfortable-heighted walls.  Wide, summer light.

Years - that porch was really just more house.  We were outside for dinner far more than in.  Dad built these big cabinets (... pine? with this heavy polymer plastic vinyl on them) for either side of the bricks of the chimney.  We had a furniture set and a dinner table - lawn furniture as living room.  I remember spending the night outside.  I remember even sometimes having the portable TV out there - oh yes, he had it electrified.  Ceiling fan, too.  Shades.  Lights.  But more than anything, just us, just sitting.  The first hummingbirds I ever saw, sitting in that porch.

"Letting the storm go by" - we'd sit outside there, closer in to the house, and the porch was so big, we didn't even get wet.  Beautiful, exciting, and intimate - sharing a storm with your family, outside but protected.  And together.

In winter time, the place was still more than just a hallway to the driveway.  We kept things out there in lieu of refrigeration.  The Christmas fudge would set outside - and live outside.  Bourbon balls, to this day, seem like the really should be cold.  Cakes, cookies, went outside to cool, to stay in tins where they would be safe.  Where us kids weren't *supposed* to steal them.  Where at least I always did.  Sugar scamp.

Dad's initials in that corner.  The "back" door close to the house, over by the hose, and the "front" door to the porch - toward the driveway.

The slate walkway up from the porch, to the shed dad also built.  The lean-to for our bikes, and the pussy willow behind it.  The blackberry bush.

I tilt my eyes across my empty yard, with no good place to sit outside on a soft night, and fantasize the porch of my dreams.  Three steps up from the yard, maybe two steps down from the living room.  A half circle, set on bricks.  Screened in - a door to this side, and one toward my neighbor's house too.  Can't have that side closed off.  A shingled roof leaning up toward the acute pitch of the house's slate roof.  In my dream, I can afford the porch to have a slate floor.  And afford a slate walk, too.  Walk from the back door to the driveway, and perhaps another walk to the porch.  Not sure how that would look.  But dreaming - everything's wonderful.

Sitting on my porch, enjoying a soft night.  The back window of my living room now a door - and that one window in the kitchen, now looking into the porch.  I imagine being in the kitchen, someone at the house and asking for something outside.

My house is beautiful, and I love it.

But I did miss out - not getting a porch.