Porches

When the three o’clock whistle blew, it meant first shift had ended at the Algodón Textile Mill. (I was an adult before I knew algodón means “cotton” in Spanish.) The mill was owned by rich Yankees who, I was told, lived in a castle in New Jersey. We lived on the hill beside the mill, in a shotgun house with a small front porch. The houses on the hill were all alike, each squatting like a hen on four piles of bricks or flat stones. When I heard the mill whistle, I would go and sit on the green metal glider on our front porch and wait for my daddy, who walked home from the mill wearing denim pants, brogan shoes, and a white t-shirt with a pack of cigarettes rolled up in the sleeve. When he got home, we would have “soupy taters” cooked with lots of butter and onion, cornbread, fried liver mush, steamed cabbage, and pinto beans.

After the supper dishes had been cleared and Momma had done her evening work, she’d put on a fresh apron and go sit on the porch. This was the signal that she was ready to receive company. The neighborhood women would come over one by one in their clean aprons to sit in the straight-back chairs or rockers. There was a Luzianne tea can at the corner of the porch for those who dipped snuff, because Momma didn’t approve of spitting in the yard. As it got dark, the women sat and murmured to one another while we kids played tag under the streetlight or caught lightning bugs, pulling off their “fire” and pasting it around our eyes and mouth so that we looked like monsters in the dark.

When I got older, I tried to sit on the porch, but the women would shoo me away. Sometimes I would quietly crawl under the front steps, mindful of the black-widow spiders and ever-present litter of kittens. Squatting on my haunches, I learned about the agony of childbirth and the trials of a woman’s monthly time. I learned whose man was chasing that little “split tail” who worked on second shift and whose husband had drunk up last week’s paycheck. I hid under the porch and listened until I was a teenager and was allowed to learn about life in the open from those tired women in their clean, starched aprons.

I often wondered how rich Yankee girls learned about life, living in castles with no front porch.

Marilyn Best
Bessemer City, North Carolina

After my freshman year of college, I spent a summer living at my parents’ house in Los Angeles, developing my addictions to video games and corn chips. The next summer my folks got me a job with a contractor who built cabins up in the sequoias. I lugged cement, dug ditches, and hauled lumber for the crew. The cantankerous contractor took delight in commenting on the smallness of my muscles and my apparent lack of testicles.

I stayed in a single room on the bottom floor of a three-story cabin. My outside door opened onto a porch just big enough for a rickety wooden bench, an old rocking chair, and a table fashioned from a wagon wheel. It was cramped, but it had a commanding view of a slate ridge across the valley and was just a few feet from a forest of fir, cedar, pine, and aspen. Busy chipmunks and squirrels scampered along tree branches and boulders, and sometimes the porch railing. Lizards darted around the porch, hunting ants. Their purposeful ways somehow made me feel less anxious and worried about my own life.

Aside from my rodent and reptilian visitors, I had no friends — and also no phone and no television. The only entertainment was a turntable and a dozen Neil Young albums. After work I’d sit on my porch, listen to the records, and watch the sun dip down between two peaks, illuminating the needles of the tallest ponderosa pines. Then I’d eat macaroni and cheese while the stars came out and the crickets chirped and the frogs croaked.

A month into the summer I went back to Los Angeles to visit my friends and family. I was struck by all the pavement and noise and busyness — car horns, airplane engines, blaring sirens. There was also a disheartening paucity of chipmunks. I felt assaulted by humanity. At night the stars were faint imposters of the ones I’d seen from my porch in the mountains.

Paul Grafton
Santa Barbara, California

He skied, went scuba diving and mountain biking, and played handball. Every year he hiked a different stretch of the Appalachian Trail. And then one morning he died. I woke up, and he was lying there beside me dead.

A neighbor helped me through the worst of it. After the ordeal was over, I returned home to . . . nothing. It was the first time I had been alone in years. I could not stand the thought of sleeping in our bed, so I grabbed his sleeping bag, because it smelled of him, and I slept in it on the back porch. I slept on the porch every night for a week. Sometimes I still do.

Snowflake
Jacks Creek, Tennessee

I’d been adopted as a newborn, and the day I turned eighteen I went to the county clerk’s office and asked to see my adoption records. A clerk escorted me behind a closed door and proceeded to scold me, saying that my records were sealed and it was against the law to open them. “Your parents adopted you because they love you,” she said. “Now go home and be content with that.”

But I believed I had a right to know the name of my biological mother, so I didn’t give up. I lied to get the information I needed and discovered that she lived in the town where I’d grown up and that she had no other children.

Despite how determined I’d been to find her, it took me ten years to get up the nerve to write her a letter, which she never answered. I waited a few more years and wrote her again. Nothing. A few years after that, I wrote a third and final letter, telling her it was all right that she didn’t want to know me, but I’d appreciate it if she would send me her family medical history. Still no reply.

I decided to leave my birth mother alone, but whenever I visited my hometown, I would drive by her house: a small two-story on a tree-lined street. The front porch had been glassed in and was cluttered with knickknacks. One night I saw her sitting on the porch, reading. A lamp shining over her shoulder lit her face. I knew it was she because I had seen a picture of her in the newspaper years before. I parked in front of the house next door, got out, and went halfway up the neighbors’ walk, careful to stay out of the circle of illumination from their outdoor light. I stood in the dark for a long time and watched my birth mother read. Then I stepped into the circle of light. Only a driveway and a pane of glass separated me from the woman who’d given birth to me. If she’d looked up, she would have seen me. But she didn’t.

I continued my drive-bys whenever I was home for a visit, but I never saw my birth mother again. After she’d died, her friends tracked me down. They hadn’t known of my existence until they’d found my letters, stacked next to the reading chair on the glassed-in porch.

Lonnie Hull DuPont
Jackson, Michigan

Growing up in the Smoky Mountains of east Tennessee, I spent a lot of time on the front porch of our log house, where we’d shuck sweet corn and eat family dinners on summer evenings, or while away lazy weekends with friends.

Now I return to that porch for comfort whenever life’s pressures and disappointments threaten to overwhelm me. The view it provides of the mountains gives me a sense of stability. No matter what turmoil is going on in my life, those mountains are the same.

A few hours away, in southern West Virginia, my friend Maria has a different view from her front porch. Her house has been in her family for generations and was once tucked into a peaceful Appalachian hollow. In recent years, however, a big coal operation has ravaged the environment around her house, blowing up the mountaintops, burying the streams in debris, and turning the forests into a toxic moonscape.

Maria recently went to court and saved one valley from a swift and permanent burial. But jobs there are hard to come by, and when the mining company laid off part of its workforce in response to her legal action, some locals made threats against Maria. To protect her family, she has built a chain-link fence around her house. The day the workers erected it, she sat and cried. Meanwhile the mountains she sees from her front porch continue to come down.

A few months ago I dreamed that a coal company was blasting apart the mountains I can see from my parents’ porch, and I felt rage and sadness. I am working with Maria to try to save her mountains, because I know she would do the same for me.

Mary Anne Hitt
Blacksburg, Virginia

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