Ode to front porches: A retrospective of writing about a very special place in my heart and imagination

So much blissful time was spent there. Last night I sat out on that now very lonesome-seeming porch, thinking about how that would be one of the last times I commune with the outdoors there, feet propped up on the railing, sadly savoring a few wistful moments there before heading back across the river to my new apartment. There, I have a small, narrow balcony on the fourth floor. My beloved rocking chair just fits and I can gently rock in the narrow space, but it will never remotely be the same experience as downtown porch offered all those years. Nevertheless, I’m grateful to have a nice place to live. The house is likely to be sold soon, and with it will go many precious memories spanning a quarter century. A lot to leave behind.

As can be seen from my porch eulogy above, I’ve had a special place in my heart for porches since I was a child. Photographs of them in my parents’ magazines always stirred curiosity and longing for such a place with a porch of my own.

Since I first began online journaling in 1998, I have written about porches and shared some of my photographs of them. Late last night I went through my Open Diary and Prosebox archives and found five entries, portions of which I am combining here into one retrospective entry on the subject.

Part 1

This is the first online journal entry I wrote, and it was about porches. It was posted on my GeoCities Website, and its reception by readers spurred me to keep on writing. And then a year later, I discovered Open Diary.

From my journal, August, 1998:

One of the keenest pleasures of leisure time to me, mostly after work in the late afternoons, edging toward twilight, is to sit on the porch of the family house in old Charleston and rock away the minutes and hours, even, as the sun sets, the birds wind down their songfests, and the night sounds begin to emerge.

Porches are civilized. They make towns and neighborhoods come alive. I could endlessly look at pictures of porches. They are gateways to the soul of a house.

I have always loved porches, and I am saddened that they are to be found mostly on older houses built before the 1950s. Suburbia brought anonymity and isolation, compared to former times when neighbors knew each other well and congregated on steps, stoops and front porches for conversation, visiting, and refreshments. It is sad, this gradual decline in porch life over the last few decades.

In neo-traditional neighborhoods and new houses built in these subdivisions, the porch however is making a comeback. That is a happy development.

Our house in Charleston is a “single house,” which means the porch is actually on the side at the front, so I look out at the garden and not at the street, which I see only by looking off to my left at an angle.

So, Charleston’s porches are more private and made for catching the breezes that are supposed to pass through the porch and on into the “single roooms” of the house. It’s a nice arrangement. And, truth be told, I really prefer this to the more exposed front porches. But I still call it the front porch.

Still, I’d sort of like to sit out there with a glass of lemonade and wave to folks who pass on the sidewalk — as if they were neighbhors — even though they are visitors, tourists, and others not of the area. I didn’t grow up with the front porch tradition. But I know I would have liked it.

My fascination with porches goes back at least to my teen years and into college and afterwards. One of the first black and white photos I took and developed and printed in a darkroom was of a small porch and chair on the front of an old house in the historic district of Sumter, SC, with a sign plainly visible, “Room for rent.” That was back in 1973. I delight in looking at all the big wrap-around porches on Victorian and Queen Ann houses from the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

I cannot even imagine living in a house without a front porch, the bigger the better. And it should have at least a couple of rockers, a swing, ceiling fan and maybe some bright red flower boxes full of geraniums. I love to sit and rock on my front porch whether it’s 3 in afternoon or 3 in the morning. Totally different kinds of mood and atmosphere prevail at those times, but I can equally enjoy anytime out there in the fresh air in the still of an afternoon, or in the deep silence of an early morning encounter with the world outside my pandemic quarantined life.

Twelve years later in December 2020, in the heart of the pandemic, I wrote this about the porch that had become a haven and a refuge for me during those terrible months when a deadly, contagious illness was everywhere:

It used to be that every house had a porch. The heyday of the front porch was the 1880s through the mid 1920s. After that the traditional meaning and significance of porches began to decline as households in later decades shifted outdoor life to the back patio, deck or lawn. In days long before the Internet changed just about everything, porches were where families congregated to see the passing parade of life in the streets and on sidewalks, and to be seen in turn by neighbors and the occasional strangers. By the 1950s through the early 1980s you never saw new houses with porches, but then during the past three decades there’s been a porch renaissance as new houses adopted more traditional architectural styles from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

I love porches and have enjoyed photographing them for more than 40 years.

December 2020

Part 2

There’s something very comforting about front porches, and I love to see houses with them. One of the best things about the historic district and the old neighborhoods of Charleston near downtown is the multitude of large, inviting porches on the old houses, some of them dating back 200 years.   There are all kinds of architectural styles downtown, so one finds quite a range of porch types.   My preference is a country farm house with a big wrap-around porch but so many of the old Charleston single houses have side porches called piazzas which can be huge with high ceilings, nice rocking chairs and other furnishings.   A great place to sit out and catch a sea breeze off the harbor or just a gentle spring or summer breeze in the warm seasons when being outside is so desired and needed after a long, cold winter such as this one we have had.

February 2010

Part 3

Some favorite porches I’ve photographed over the years:

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/eC35A0

Part 4

Life seems altogether different from the perspective of the rocking chair on the porch.   I look out over the garden, trees, a birdbath, feeder and can listen to the gentle murmuring sounds of the fountain in the front garden.   Porches are such civilized places.   In times past they were gathering places for families and neighbors.  Now they don’t get as much use, but I hope that will be changing.

November 2008

I don’t think there is anything that calms me down and soothes my restless spirit more than sitting on the porch at the family house in Charleston, rocking in a special well-worn chair as sundown gathers momentum and cicadas begin and end their brief late afternoon symphonic arrangements in the trees. Pure summer.

June 2006

Part 5

The Front Porch
By Edgar Guest

Sittin’ on the porch at night, when all the tasks are done,

Just restin’ there an’ talkin’, with my easy slippers on.

An’ my shirt band thrown wide open an’ my feet upon the rail,

Oh, it’s then I’m at my richest, with a wealth that cannot fail;

For the scent of the late gardenias seems to flood the evening air,

An’ a throne of downright gladness is my wicker rocking chair.

The dog asleep beside me, an’ the children rompin’ ’round,

With their shrieks of merry laughter — there is no gladder sound

To the ears o’ weary mortals, spite of all the scoffers say

Or a grander bit of music than the children at their play.

And I tell myself times over, when I’m sittin there at night,

That the world in which I’m livin’ is a place o’ real delight.

Then the moon begins its climin’ an’ the stars shine overhead

An’ the mother calls the children an’ she takes ’em up to bed.

An’ I smoke my pipe in silence an’ I think o’ many things,

An’ balance up my riches with the lonesomeness o’ kings,

An’ I come to this conclusion, an’ I’ll wager that I’m right —

That I’m happier than they are, sittin’ on my porch at night.

Part 6

Last night on a cool autumn evening, I sat in my favorite rocking chair on the porch at the family house downtown, looking out over the garden and listening to the last of the summer insect songs. It will soon be very still and quiet out there at night as winter evenings bring colder temperatures and the cricket songs diminish and fade away. But for now, it’s mild enough to sit for hours if I want on that porch, relaxed, peaceful and dreaming away the moments, with nothing to do but sit and think…

To me, the front porch is a place that offers sanctuary — it’s a window on the world, a way to hear the street sounds and know that humanity is humming away about it’s business along the sidewalks and street just beyond, but it’s private enough to allow me a place to doze and rock in my favorite chair. I know that while I am on the front porch, I don’t have to do anything. Time is stopped for awhile and remains so as long as I’m out there.

Years ago, every house had a porch. People sat out there and spun tales, socialized with neighbors, and greeted strangers passing by. I wonder if this will ever come back, or whether we will just stay indoors mostly, in our cocoons.

November 2005

Part 7

On a tree-lined street in the historic district of a Sumter, a small city in South Carolina, on a corner lot with a sidewalk in front is a turn-of-the-century house that for more than [45] years, since I first saw it, has stirred my imagination, roused ancient memories of family times together at Christmas, and provided the missing ingredient for the life I might have lived in some past age had different circumstances placed me there. Who knows? There is some reason why this house stirs such deep and passionate feelings within me.

I love to pass by on walks and just look longingly at it. I admire its gracefulness, its beautiful architecture and symetry. It seems to be so well proportioned.

I love porches, and this house has a big, wide wrap-around porch with rocking chairs which calls to mind a gentler more neighborly era when every house had them and people spent long hours in summer outside talking and laughing, resting, daydreaming on a swing hung from the porch’s ceiling or greeting neighbhoors who stopped by. Children played in the yard or on the sidewalk, or in the small city park that was nearby.

I can imagine entering the front door and noticing a slightly musty, old-house smell. Memories from childhood would immediately come to mind. There would be a worn rug on the wooden floor in the hallway adjacent to the stairs that lead to three upstairs bedrooms. A parlor to my left would have comfortably upholstered old furniture, a glass bookcase with volumes of Dickens, Mark Twain and Shakespeare, a fireplace, and windows that opened out onto a shady yard.

When I pass this house, I think of the decades that people have lived there. I wonder about the holiday feasts that filled the home with happy relatives and friends. I can smell the roasting turkey or fried fish dinners at midday with cornbread and poll beans and fatback and rice and gravy. Such indescribable aromas, for those are the smells I remember from my aunt’s kitchen during blissful days of summer vacation far from my own childhood house in New Orleans. I can imagine all this in that old house.
Yes, I think this house I have been describing and imaging must be my all-time favorite. I have never been inside it. I know nothing in particular about its history. Yet I do know that it must hold many lovingly guarded and cherished memories for several generations who have been lucky enough to call it “home.”

February 2003

Part 8

I remember spending a lot of time as a kid with MaMa. I spent a lot of time over there.

One time she said, “Well, let’s go sit on the porch.”

I said, “What are we gonna do?”

She looked at me kinda quizzically, and she said, “Well, we’re gonna greet passerby.”

I said, “And then what are we gonna do?”
She said, “We’ll wave.”

And she and my grandfather would sit and rock. He had his coffee can — he chewed tobacco — and he would spit, and rock and wave. And when a car would come, MaMa would kinda crane her neck a little and watch…and wave.
“I’d say, “MaMa, who was that?”

“I’m not sure, my sha.” (Creole for “dear”)

“Why did you wave?”

“Well, you always wave!”

Roseanne St. Romaine, quoted in Swinging in Place: Porch Life in Southern Culture by Jocelyn Hazelwood Donlon

May 2002

Part 9

Maybe I have always been old before my time, but I have loved porches since I was young and dreamed of what it would be like to live in those old Victorian houses I saw in Sumter as a child and which fascinated me no end. There is a house in that town which has one of those big wrap-around porches with rocking chair for sitting out on quiet summer evenings, when the sounds of the neighborhood echo softly in the night, the last of the children freed from school have ceased their banshee shouts and play under the streetlamps, and only an occasional car goes by.

June 2001

Part 10

Part 11

It was the deepest front porch in Byarsvile, Georgia. If noontime gloom in the parlor was a midwinter nuisance, it was more than mitigated by the delights of living on that porch in summertime. The house faced due north, and the sun never shone full under the proches’s overhang; just enough rays slanted in to make the sultanas spectacular. If there was a breeze anywhere in town, it could be found sitrring there, slowing twisting the baskets of ferns on their chains and cooling the perspiration on a visitor in tantalizing welcome. The porch was so deep that Miss Addie did not even need to turn the rocking chairs up against the house when it rained; she just pulled them back from the railing. It was a livable porch, a lovable proch, and Miss Addie presided there in queenly serenity.

from “Fulfillment” by Ferrol Sams

Conclusion

Saturday afternoon, it was raining here, and I sat on the porch of the house in Charleston and put my feet up on the railing because it is not a deep porch, and soon I was getting wet from the light rain that was falling now and soaking my shoes. The ceiling fan was whirring soundlessly, cooling us off a bit, but not much. There was some wind with the rain, but not much of that either. I was just thankful for the sight of that rain after months of drought. I remember looking at it curiously, almost as it to remind myself what it looked like.

After awhile, I pulled the chair back against the outside stucco wall of the house, and watched the world outside from the drier distance. The cats were sleeping, the palmettoes were rustling slightly, the grass seemed greener than it had in ages. It wasn’t much to quench the ground’s thirst, but it helped. It was a soft afternoon made for relaxing and thinking, and not much else. It was nice.

June 2001

Me in a classic front porch setting, 2005

https://www.flickr.com/gp/camas/jc37hm

My all-time favorite book about porches, a true classic published in 1992:
https://flic.kr/p/2neXP