Voices

by Vic Jameson

The Front Porch

It is an excellent house in almost every way.

Its gently sloping roof is topped with treated long-life asphalt shingles, its doors and windows framed in aluminum. Its outer walls are carefully insulated against summer heat and winter snow.

The living room provides ample space for a long-enough-to-nap-on couch and a pair of overstuffed chairs to satisfy a housewife’s yearning for comfort and style. The dining area is small enough for two and large enough for eight, and opens onto a flagstone terrace. There are three bedrooms and baths. Unlike most residences, it has plenty of closets. To repeat, it is an ideal house in every way but one:

It has no porch.

Not every dwelling, of course, can include a porch and that’s a pity. Especially in cities where the cost of land drives builders to go up, not out. And even in smaller locales the desire for interior niceties mostly crowds out porches.

Some say the porch is no longer necessary— that lifestyles and air conditioning have made the porch passe.

But not so. Ask a parent—or maybe a grandparent—and you’re likely to hear stories of how much richer life was when it was centered around the front porch rather than the television set. There’s something aesthetic about a porch that does not easily transfer.

My paternal grandfather was a storekeeper most of the year I knew him, operating a general mercantile in a northeastern New Mexico village. On many a long summer afternoon he played Chinese checkers with me, sitting on the porch that stretched along the front of his store. And evenings after supper various family members and neighbors would gather on the front porch of the W.A.Jameson house. There was never an agenda, but there were plenty of topics—politics (FDR and his controversial New Deal), sporting events (was this fellow Lou Gehrig really better than Babe Ruth?) or the weather (would this terrible drouth never end?) among them.

Even otherwise restless kids were allowed in on the front porch discussions so long as they didn’t show up their elders or talk too often. Over time, they would pick up tidbits about their forefather-soldier in the Revolution, and lesser tales about uncles or aunts who had been homesteaders, ranchers, carpenters, or teachers—along with murkier stories of cousins who had wandered West and disappeared.

But that was then, and time and leisure for porch-sitting have gone the way of five-cent ice cream cones. We have traded our free evenings for television and our porches for air conditioning and few—if any—would willingly trade back.

And yet...

We have the most advanced science anyone could dream of but we haven’t got rid of hunger in our own land. We can communicate around the world in seconds but we can’t seem to talk with each other.

I know it’s fantasy but I sometimes wish we could persuade the leaders of our countries to sit down with each other and talk things over. To leave their weapons and ambitions and grudges behind and simply talk. No rigid agendas or schemes would be needed. Just a willingness to talk with and listen to each other.

And, of course, a good front porch.