I got this book in September, and although I started to browse it during one of the Kansas City games I watched on a Sunday evening or afternoon (when I had an intact lower level, which I will have again, maybe, maybe in 2027). However, the text-to-photo ratio made it too wordy for football games. So I’ve been working my way through it on evenings in my bisected family room.
At any rate, this is a coffeetable book about decorating porches and enjoying them once you’ve done so. It’s broken into chapters covering the types of porches, good porch furniture, what to do on a porch, decorating porches, and planting on or around them. The chapters are laden with text describing, generically, and each page has one or two small (well, mostly small but sometimes medium sized) photos to illustrate. So it’s a strange combination, text-heavy, and seemingly anachronistic. Most modern builds have decks in the back instead of porches, but it did make me think back to the homes in Old Trees and Lemay, the houses which were a hundred years old and such, where porches were more prevalent. And it made me think back to porches I have mostly not known.
- The first apartment complex: No porch, maybe a concrete pad. We moved from that place when I was four, so I only remember a couple of glimpses, like drawing on a metal green sedan with a rock and the talking to I got after that.
- The projects: A concrete step/platform shared with the Whites and later the Johnstons next door. Not enough for a “porch” but enough brick wall between the doors to throw a tennis ball and catch it when it came back or to use as a backstop for games of strikeout.
- We lived with the family friends that my sainted mother inherited in the divorce in a ranch house with maybe a concrete slab out front?
- When we lived in St. Charles with my aunt, the house had a little concrete slab out front, but not a “porch.” (I checked my seven-year-old now photo of the house to be sure.) It did have a deck out back, though, not that I remember anyone sitting on it–although I am sure my brother and I lounged on the hammock out there once or twice.
- The trailer had a little “deck” which was about, what, 10 by 10 feet? That would be 100 square feet, and that doesn’t seem right. Maybe 7 by 7. No furniture, maybe a little grill, and a place to sell Tim C. Vince Coleman rookie cards for fifty cents per. I wondered if I was getting taken, but it seemed to be a good trade at the time. Fifty cents in 1986 or 1987 is like $80 now, and you’re all saying, “Vince who?”
- Down the gravel road, the house had a concrete slab; I remember putting a lawn chair out one Hallowe’en, stuffing some clothing around a five gallon bucket, and putting a jack o’lantern atop the bucket. But it wasn’t a “porch.”
- My father’s house in Milwaukee, where I lived with his family while I was at the university, had a set of concrete steps to his front walk. I did spend some time on those steps early in my college career, trying to learn harmonica in the darkness. It was early in my college career, before Dave went Airborne. But, mark it: The first time I spent out of the house nearby. Like, on a porch.
- When I lived with my sainted mother in my aunt’s house in Lemay, it had a bit of a porch which was a couple square feet of concrete up some steps which led to the front door and the kitchen door (which were adjacent but turned ninety degrees).
- My first apartment opened to a breezeway.
- Our first house, the one my beautiful wife and I rented as we married, had two porches: An open porch on the front and a screened-in side porch. We used the side porch for storage and probably did nothing on the front porch but accept deliveries. Not from Amazon, child.
- Casinoport (the house I called Honormoor, sweet Christmas, after “To Lucasta, On Going To The Wars”, a poem I’d forgotten that I remembered in 2020 but recently exhumed evidence indicates was true had a concrete slab out front behind pillars, and we put a bench out there (did we?) and some plantings, but we did not spend time out there except working on it. We had a small deck out back, and we might have had something on it, but we did not spend time out there, either–I traversed it grilling or taking the garbage out. Ai de mi, I spent more time underneath it, bailing water from the bottom of the walkout basement steps or sweeping and clearing it daily so I wouldn’t have to bail. But Pleasure? No.
- Old Trees: Ah, now, we’ve got a front porch that we used. Even though it was within shouting distance of an interstate. We had a porch swing we used. My wife had plants out there. We had a stroller staged for our young son because we walked him all over Old Trees. We even had the painted porch improved with staining and grinding into the appearance of flag stone. Ah, were we getting older?
- Nogglestead has a slab out front with a step outside the front door. Ah, and, oh!, but my oldest has decorated the “porch.” When we were in Alton, Missouri, at a fundraiser for a marriage-cousin with cancer, he bought a birdhouse/craft thing and put it on the brick stoop (the two I bought are on the mantel–one is next to the Christmas Intruder 2026 and the other is just to the left of the frame). And, at some point, he dragged the rocking chair which his grandmothers painted and placed in his bedroom before he was born so that we could rock him out there. And he might have sitten there a couple of times, but, ah, brothers and sisters, it is my go-to for reading First Things and New Oxford Review. I sit out there, sometimes in the middle of the day (which is, you know if you’ve been paying attention, scandalous behavior). Nogglestead has also featured a robust deck (past tense, and maybe future tense if the fireplace does not cost us our small fortune and burn the house down) and a bit of a “patio”–a concrete slab below the deck. I’ve enjoyed them in turns over the last seventeen years. Because I’ve changed to enjoy outside time, I guess.
You know, the house my grandmother rented the last years of her life had a front porch with a swing and a screened-in back porch that was mostly storage. My aunt had sunrooms on the back of her houses–when my sainted mother and I were living in her rental house, I slept in that sunroom for a time. But aside from the sunrooms, none of the porches were as elaborately done up as the ones in this book.
So I kinda enjoyed the book, but more I enjoyed the reminisciences it spurred.
