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“The first time.”
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Happy writing, loved ones!
“Come on! Just do it. Stop being such a pussy.” I grab the blunt from my brother’s hand and inhale the pot. Deeply. My lungs want to cough, sputter, give up, but I won’t let him win. It burns my chest and throat, like a fire igniting in my toes, the tops of the flames licking at my tonsils. If mom were home, she would be able to see us from where she painstakingly washes our dinner plates every night. The light from the kitchen illuminates the weather worn wooden railing I grip as I adjust to this new sensation.
I am fourteen.
“Wow. That didn’t hurt at all.” I sit in my mother’s lawn chairs, the one’s we inherited when grandma died. They are plastic, blue and white and they stick to the back of my legs in this hot June heat. Matt and I sit alone, in the dark, the fire from his cigeratte lighting the soft fuss above his lips. He leans against the house, quiet, looking down. “They say it’s supposed to hurt the first time. But I feel fine. I don’t feel any different.”
I am eighteen.
“Madison sit still.” My mother keeps lowering the camera from her eye, attempting with no luck to get Maddie to stay on the porch swing while she takes their picture. The grandkids. My babes. My surrogate children until…when? When will I finally get around to that life altering choice? Hmmm…
A giggle erupts from Maddie’s throat and her dimples, those dimples that can raise my spirits anytime, deepen in her pinchable cheeks.
I am twenty two and far away from home.
Awakened by the light of a crescent moon rising, I step onto my back porch.
Hours before dawn, the crisp air excites my skin. I am alert; I am alive.
I look to the east, to the Mogollon Mountains that have given up this slip of a moon to an otherwise pitch-black sky.
I step off my porch, look up, and step into a world of wonder: Four stars shoot across the inky dome, one after another, in rapid fire.
My eyes adjust. I realize there’s an ocean of stars floating over my head and I reach out, palms upward.
Raising my arms in gratitude, I breathe it all in. I am a vessel for this glorious galaxy.
Back on my porch, I face the starry sky once more and smile.
Awakened by a silver moon rising, my body glistens in the lunar lamplight. I am the stuff of stars.
Janis Marston
Glenwood, New Mexico
Awakened by the light of a crescent moon rising, I step onto my back porch.
Hours before dawn, the crisp air excites my skin. I am alert; I am alive.
I look to the east, to the Mogollon Mountains that have given up this slip of a moon to an otherwise pitch-black sky.
I step off my porch, look up, and step into a world of wonder: Four stars shoot across the inky dome, one after another, in rapid fire.
My eyes adjust. I realize there’s an ocean of stars floating over my head and I reach out, palms upward.
Raising my arms in gratitude, I breathe it all in. I am a vessel for this glorious galaxy.
Back on my porch, I face the starry sky once more and smile.
Awakened by a silver moon rising, my body glistens in the lunar lamplight. I am the stuff of stars.
Janis Marston
Glenwood, New MexicoAwakened by the light of a crescent moon rising, I step onto my back porch.
Hours before dawn, the crisp air excites my skin. I am alert; I am alive.
I look to the east, to the Mogollon Mountains that have given up this slip of a moon to an otherwise pitch-black sky.
I step off my porch, look up, and step into a world of wonder: Four stars shoot across the inky dome, one after another, in rapid fire.
My eyes adjust. I realize there’s an ocean of stars floating over my head and I reach out, palms upward.
Raising my arms in gratitude, I breathe it all in. I am a vessel for this glorious galaxy.
Back on my porch, I face the starry sky once more and smile.
Awakened by a silver moon rising, my body glistens in the lunar lamplight. I am the stuff of stars.
Janis Marston
Glenwood, New Mexico
When I was a child, we did not have a back porch, although our two-hundred-year-old home housed a wrap around front porch. At one point, the porch was adorned with an ornate railing, but it was far too expensive for my parents to replace. As my father remodeled the old place, he decided to remove the railing entirely. The historical society had a coronary, and made mention in one of their little booklets that the home’s owners had “deviated” from the original design.
Our house was built by a sea captain, whom we are convinced was a friendly spiritual inhabitant. Years later, the house was divided into several living quarters, where my parents began their marriage in a two room apartment with a shared bath. Eventually they bought the house with my grandparents, and my father set about to gutting the second floor, one room at a time. When I was five, they took over the house entirely, and began remodeling the first floor. Neither the elderly couple living upstairs, nor my parents, took advantage of the front porch, save a quick step to collect mail. Mom and Dad were far too busy working inside the house, to enjoy sitting on the front porch. This memory gives me pause, as I contemplate the amount of time I spend cleaning my home, instead of sitting outside in the sunshine.
I loved our front porch. We’d spend rainy summer afternoons playing cards or monopoly, as a way to amuse ourselves, while remaining outdoors. Without computers, or video games, or air conditioning, summers were spent out of the house, rain or shine. And unless we had a book in our lap, our parents considered idle time hanging around inside, as an invitation to chores.
When I was very young, the porch served as a springboard to leap and roll in the grassy area beneath. The underbelly housed nighttime creatures, and only the bravest kid would venture inside this wooden cavern. My bedroom windows faced the porch, and it took me a few years, but I finally managed to grow enough that I could hoist myself up through a window and outside onto the porch.
Years later, when I returned to my parents home after a painful divorce, I lived in the apartment. The porch became a respite, a place to sit and watch the world go by, chat with a friend, and find a little outdoor privacy from my ever looming parents.
My son is not a child with many material requests, however, when he does speak up, it is usually something grand. One of his requests was a porch. Maybe the next house…
When I was a child, we did not have a back porch, although our two-hundred-year-old home housed a wrap around front porch. At one point, the porch was adorned with an ornate railing, but it was far too expensive for my parents to replace. As my father remolded the old place, he decided to remove the railing entirely. The historical society had a coronary, and made mention in one of their little booklets that the home’s owners had “deviated” from the original design.
Our house was built by a sea captain, whom we are convinced was a friendly spiritual inhabitant. Years later, the house was divided into several living quarters, where my parents began their marriage in a two room apartment with a shared bath. Eventually they bought the house with my grandparents, and my father set about to gutting the second floor, one room at a time. When I was five, they took over the house entirely, and began remodeling the first floor. Neither the elderly couple living upstairs, nor my parents, took advantage of the front porch, save a quick step to collect mail. Mom and Dad were far too busy working inside the house, to enjoy sitting on the front porch. This memory gives me pause, as I contemplate the amount of time I spend cleaning my home, instead of sitting outside in the sunshine.
I loved our front porch. We’d spend rainy summer afternoons playing cards or monopoly, as a way to amuse ourselves, while remaining outdoors. Without computers, or video games, or air conditioning, summers were spent out of the house, rain or shine. And unless we had a book in our lap, our parents considered idle time hanging around inside, as an invitation to chores.
When I was very young, the porch served as a springboard to leap and roll in the grassy area beneath. The underbelly housed nighttime creatures, and only the bravest kid would venture inside this wooden cavern. My bedroom windows faced the porch, and it took me a few years, but I finally managed to grow enough that I could hoist myself up through a window and outside onto the porch.
Years later, when I returned to my parents home after a painful divorce, I lived in the apartment. The porch became a respite, a place to sit and watch the world go by, chat with a friend, and find a little outdoor privacy from my ever looming parents.
My son is not a child with many material requests, however, when he does speak up, it is usually something grand. One of his requests was a porch. Maybe the next house…
I did not have a back porch growing up. I’ve read about them. Images of lovely evenings overlooking a lake or the ocean and a pair of adirondack chairs come to mind. It’s almost a shame I grew up in a city row home. There was no haven behind the kitchen, but a long narrow strip of grass with flowers on either side. Back then I was a bit of a high strung bug-wus. (I’m still working on that – I’ve gotten better with age.) Relaxation outside was a contradiction in terms, at least not without alcohol and a gallon of DEET.
Fortunately, I have come to appreciate (through a friend’s example) how beautiful some parts of this planet can be. While you’ll still never catch me camping, I’ve learned it’s possible to relax, gain perspective, and find a haven by shifting your focus from the bugs to the beauty in front of you. Sometimes I manage this better than others. Stress relief is such a huge industry and yet some of the best remedies are free. Any place I can really see the nature in front of me not on the way to somewhere else works. Who knew?
I now have a favorite back porch. It is in Massachusetts although my kitchen window is in New Jersey. There are no adirondacks or water nearby but beautiful mountains and an overwhelming feeling of peace that’s undeniable even to nervous me. It’s a yoga center I drag my supportive husband to once or twice a year. I do not do yoga (though friends have suggested I try it). I go there to write, to feed my soul. We got my mom to watch our baby and stayed at a glorious bed and breakfast nearby. I love our baby but I’m always sad to leave.
There is no physical room that’s all my own in our house as space is at a premium. A back porch is pretty much your own little piece of sunset over water, whatever its form. It is literally soul food. Of course, I can find this kind of haven for brief periods when I escape to my shower or lay down and listen to a relaxation CD when our baby naps. I do still look for opportunities to extend these periods closer to home.
When our daughter gets older and the stress of life can get blinding, I hope I can help her find her own haven. Like every parent, I want her to learn my lessons much earlier than I did. Had I realized how important it was to make time to relax and find some peace periodically, my high school years may have been easier. Life is not a to do list and sometimes the most important thing one can do is nothing. Watching a sunset, birds fly, or water lapping is a great reminder of how to appreciate the world around you and pull out of your own little vortex.
Those who are lucky enough to have a physical back porch that’s usable for its intended purpose (aka not loaded with junk), I hope you take advantage – at least once in a while. Some of us have to drive to get there!
I never had the back porch. I had balcony. I had roof terrace. I had a deck. I will never have the back porch. I miss not ever having it. Sometimes I have a distinct nostalgic feeling for the late summer nights, gentle motion of my rocking chair, sitting on the porch, waiting for the time between the day’s end and the edge of the night when present, past and future merge into one.
My back porch would be a place where my mind could wonder wherever it wishes, without interventions of “right here and right now.” As the twilight gently makes its tranquil journey, I am joining the timelessness of the moment.
Now I can invite alive, dead, real or fictitious characters. to join me. Sometimes an uninvited person just appears.
I am dozing off and on, wondering whom to invite that could provoke me into higher state of awareness.
“Are you sitting there, doing nothing again?” I did not need to open my eyes to see my friend and mentor. Stanko’s baritone is melodic, even tempered.. and at the edge of eruption.
“No, I am not sleeping. I was just thinking whom to invite tonight, You surprised me.”
“This is not a surprise.” He comes closer, bows and takes off his hat to put it right back on. He is a short man. His too long pants cover his shoes with raised heels, His jacket’s shoulders are oversized and he keeps on pulling up his sleeves. It is his hat, sitting tall on top of his head that became a talk among us who knew, respected and loved him. Entering cafe or restaurant he half tilts it and keeps it on. One of our mischievous friends asked him in front of a check girl: “Don’t you see that everybody checks in their hats?”
“Sure I see. Don’t you see that they leave they heads with their hats in check room?”
Ignoring my reflections. he says firmly: “This visit is long overdue. Tonight we shall talk about our last time together”
“But that was 40 years ago.”
“Now we are in a timeless world of memories, Let’s open the door to my apartment. I am lying flat on my bed. You are curled up in the armchair, watching me, fighting to fall asleep. After two days you are still with me.”
“Oh yes, I know. I could never forget it.”
“Don’t try to remember, go back to your armchair”…
“Yes, it is late in the evening. I am struggling to keep my eyes open. You ask me to lie next to you. I hesitate. I am frightened, horrified, scared to death. I know this is no time to panicky. I know that you are dying. Trembling uncontrollably I lie next to you. I do not dare to move. I am still as if I were dead, barely breathing. Now and then I am looking at you. You are sleeping peacefully, resting your hand on mine.
I do not want to fall asleep but do without knowing it. When I wake up you look peacefully asleep. Your hand is not holding mine any more. I listen for your breath. There is total silence. You are dead. What happened? I was right here. The death must have come while I was sleeping. It came in total silence without disturbing your body. You are lying as you were. There is a hint of a smile which was not there before. All is tranquil, My fears vanished.”
With a slight bow, tilt of his hat and a smile, Stanko turns around to leave theporch. Just as he came, without warning. His bodily image disappeared. His voice is lingering in the shadows of the night:
The death will be something entirely human.
We called it a back porch
But really it was just two steps and a landing
Wide enough for two (medium size) people to sit next to each other on the stoop.
In the fifties when the Catholic Church thought
It had the copyright on God,
We three girls were dutifully disciplined to believe that
Non-Catholics were poison.
Names like Baptist, Atheist.
Agnostic, Hindu, or Muslim.
Were nonexistent in our vocabulary.
There were only two qualified camps
Catholic and non-Catholic.
Sandy and I (at the tender ages of nine and ten) spent time
Closely observing our older sister Marilyn
Growing into a genuine, verifiable teenager right before our eyes.
Along came Bob from the other camp.
He and our sister sat on the back porch step together.
We couldn’t just stare out the window of the door
Or the one other window in the living room.
So we rushed upstairs to the bedroom overlooking the back yard.
The back porch was so close to the house
That we had to smash our faces on the glass to see anything.
We took turns spying and praying.
I prayed and she spied
Then I spied and she prayed.
We begged God to not let her love him
We didn’t want our big sister to
Suffer the loss of heaven
And the pains of hell.
What was so critical, grave, and sincere then
Seems so sad and silly today.
Thank God!
Judith Safford
August 17, 2009
She’s heading out to the back porch. She’s fanning herself again, sprawled out on the rattan couch with flowered cushions. She laying, she’s sitting, she’s grabbing at the collar of her top and pulling it down, revealing her ample cleavage in hopes that just that little bit more of exposed skin will help lower her temperature. My mother was hot for most of my childhood.
The back porch was one of the best places in our house. With a cement floor and 20 foot ceiling, it was 500 square feet of screened in living. Besides the couch and two chairs, there were two tables, resembling square boxes, a wrought iron white glass topped dining table with curly flowers surrounding its edge and metal chairs with springy seats, direct from my grandmother’s house. In the corner was an old pinball machine with nails that surrounded the pocket holes, white marbles and a slot for a nickel that I must have inserted $10,000 into while trying to survive my adolescent boredom.
These floor to ceiling screened walls helped my mother attempt to control her raging hormonal fluctuations. You could find her there after dinner, late at night, in a polyester nightgown, in flip flops, in shorts. In the dead of winter, with the furniture securely under plastic wrap and the pinball machine draped in tarp, there was my mother, bathed in sweat, breathing in the frigid New England air, waiting for it to freeze out her menopausal moment.
I didn’t understand back then, a naive 10 year old, why my mother was always so damn hot. But here at 50 I now fully and unfortunately comprehend the heat waves that washed over my mother like Niagra Falls. Oh yes, what goes around comes around. Like mother, like daughter. When I least expect it, I’m a George Foreman Grill. Forget frying an egg on the sidewalk in a heat wave, just crack that thing on my forehead and put the bread in the toaster.
I don’t understand the whole thing, the shift of this hormone and that, whether it’s too little progesterone, or too much estrogen that creates my mini Hawaiian vacations, but I do know how, all things considered, I’d rather be in Philadelphia.
Other than her rather incessant descents into hotness, my mother didn’t talk much to me about the big pause. She didn’t tell me the finer points of no longer getting a period, the moods, floatie of fat that pads your middle, the interrupted sleep, or smooth skin that suddenly looks like a crinkled paper bag. She stayed pretty silent, on the topic, which is more than I can say I’m doing. I’ll whine to anybody who will listen, which is probably even less attractive than the sweat on my upper lip.
I am in the “Back Porch” time of life. If I had one, I’m sure I’d be living out there right now. But I don’t, and so open windows and doors and air conditioners and fans and cold wash cloths serve as my screened in solution. The memory of my mom back there fanning herself wildly like some sort of Tasmanian Devil, taking in the breeze through the screens, gives me a little laugh and a little comfort. If only. If only it could keep me cool.
There was no telling how many years I would have been able to sneak out of my parent’s house without anybody knowing had I not grown so much. Actually the problem was not growth as much as it was about weight because my secret route out of the back window and down a series of electrical boxes was limited by how much I weighed.
My father was an engineer so he was very observant and fairly intelligent. He was also very strict so getting permission to leave the house was difficult. There were also two brothers and a sister ahead of me so all of the really obvious escape routes had been discovered and sealed up. I used to jump out of the front window onto an enormous azalea bush that my father had carefully nurtured from a little sprig. Again my weight started being a problem because he could not figure out why the bush took a sudden turn for the worse at irregular intervals. That was out so I set out to adopt a plan for an alternate route.
I began to reconnoiter the possible opportunities open to me. We lived in a big; two story Victorian house in New Orleans and all of the bedrooms were upstairs. The ceilings were twelve feet high and the house was about four feet off of the ground so any thought about leaving from the second floor needed serious planning to avoid life threatening injury. The choice between a chat with my father and a twenty foot fall was not really hard to make. In fact, the house would have had to have been considerably higher for me to elect to get the OK from dad.
As I looked around I realized that all of the electric service was on the back of the house along with other appliances that were mounted on the back wall. The back porch had a high railing that allowed a relatively small person to stand on and barely reach the housing for the exhaust fan in the kitchen. That person could then scramble up the electrical conduit to the fan and finally stand on the fan itself. From the fan the person could reach for the electrical panel and gain more altitude by getting on top of the panel. Once on top of the panel the trip became much more hazardous as there was no more electrical conduit to climb on. The final four feet to the bottom of the window casement required a leap of faith. I thought that I could climb up to the window but I realized that the first trip would have to be down that treacherous path. Could I get down from the window because, after all, I never had a problem getting into the house; only out.
My first decent went without a hitch. I had it made because no one would ever think that a person could climb up and down a shear wall to achieve a private access to the house. All was well for several months until one day, as I climbed down the wall, the conduit between the fan and the panel pulled away from the house and I fell backwards into my father’s prize fig tree. Somehow my destroying his fig tree allowed him to make the connection between his sick azalea bush and my spending hours in my room tree. Like I said, he was fairly smart.
The back porch at the Outermost Inn in Aquinnah, on Martha’s Vineyard is a magical realm and hidden secret in a busy world. It is the only place I’ve ever been that personified the summertime experience. Never too warm or too cold the air lightly touched my sense of smell with hints of Lavender and damp Roses. And though the ocean was down a half mile sandy path its cooling surf winds would breeze over this haven of peace refreshing the midday sun baked landscape.
In the morning the wide open back porch greets you with a panoramic view of a lush and natural backyard complete with nesting perch for the resident Osprey. While larger than the usual back deck, it didn’t hurt that there was enough space for a full service bar that would have kept Hemmingway writing a little longer. I could have taken in the ambiance of the entire island from one of those oak bar stools if not for my infinitely wiser spouse.
The perfect experience for those early August nights occurred regularly on the back porch as visitors to the Inn would gather to wait for dinner. Music softly played in the background as the sun would slowly set and the patrons became part of summer evening. They pleasantly chatted while consuming wine and hors d’oeuvres and it created a sense of wonderful exclusivity without having to know someone on the inside.
While conversation and laughter echoed from this quiet part of the island it was the brass ring toss game always held the center of attention. The ring was almost three inches in diameter and quite thick. It was tied on a string at just the right length from the ceiling to swing to a hook facing a support post. You had to swing the ring at just the right speed and angle to catch the hook. With each attempt there was an interesting knocking sound that came from the brass striking solid wood. It was a game of challenge that only seemed to get easier after you consumed a few alcoholic beverages. People couldn’t help but laugh and talk about the game as the night went on.
The warm air, the laughter and the wonderful aroma of fine gourmet food helped slow summer down those nights on that back porch. It was the only experience that ever rivaled my most cherished memories of summer evenings at my Grandmother’s house or of sitting at an open air café in Barcelona many years prior.
