Growing up in an orphanage, I often felt like a prisoner. My only refuge was the courtyard of the old mission. I’d wait until late afternoon, when the tourists would be gone and the courtyard — filled with bougainvillea, flowering trellises, and bird song — would be all mine. Then I would squeeze my six-year-old body through an opening at the top of a barred window and drop down onto the clay tiles.

I could usually find a sizable cigarette butt in the sand-filled pot next to the entrance of the church. I would sneak up to the altar and light my cigarette with the flame of a devotional candle. Then I’d scurry up the steps to the bell tower and stand on the outer edge of the landing, where I couldn’t be seen, to smoke and feel the nicotine rush.

The bell-tower landing, because of its height and location next to the church’s main entrance, was a perfect vantage point from which to survey the valley below. It was my private sanctuary where I smoked and dreamed of running away. I wondered how far I could get before being caught. There were houses dotting the tops of the distant canyon walls, and I always imagined one of them was my grandmother’s home. If only I could get to her, I thought, I would be safe.

My grandmother actually did live somewhere in those hills, but I knew if I ran away, she would send me back. The only thing worse than being in the orphanage would have been the humiliation of having my grandmother reject me.

Francis Collin Brown
Port Townsend, Washington

The four of us — two sets of two brothers — shared a sleeping porch from 1949 to 1960. Not one of us ever thought to complain, even when we woke freezing at 3 a.m. despite our electric blankets, which were all set to 10 and plugged into one extension cord.

The unheated, uninsulated porch had just enough room for two metal bunk beds and two chests of drawers; no closet. We covered the windows with cardboard and rags to cut down on drafts. A single forty-watt bulb inside a milky white globe hung from the ceiling. (Sometimes the globe was shattered in the warfare among us.) We kept the floor swept and the beds made to boot-camp standards. During the Kansas winter the wind rattled the windowpanes and caused the curtains to dance; in the summer the heat left us gasping for any air we could capture from the one oscillating fan.

Our house was located near the Kansas State Industrial Reformatory, and when an inmate escaped, a siren would wail to warn the neighborhood. We once stayed up all night with trip ropes, hoping to catch an escapee and receive a reward. Another night I dreamed an escapee broke in and was coming toward my bed with a butcher knife raised. For months I slept with the covers over my head and my body pressed against the wall.

Today the others and I all live in upscale houses with large master-bedroom suites; none of us is any happier for it.

Ronald Riffel
Sarasota, Florida

We were first cousins, a nineteen-year-old girl and a sixteen-year-old boy, entwined and panting on my parents’ Main Street front porch in small-town Alabama. I believe I still had my bra on, but the rest of our clothes were off. His tongue twirled there, where I’d never let a boy put his tongue before. My mouth sucked at him there. (I’d never made it with an uncircumcised boy before.) A few times headlights came slicing through the predawn gloom, and we cowered to avoid being spotted. Our bodies slapped against each other, the paint-peeled concrete scratching my back under his frenetic thrusting. We shouldn’t have been doing this: I had a boyfriend; he had a girlfriend. His mother was asleep not five feet away inside the house.

Suddenly the porch light blazed on above our heads, and he grabbed his clothes and ran around to the back of the house. I yanked my shirt over my head and followed him, bare bottomed, to the dark backyard, where he crouched in the dirt underneath the not-quite-finished back porch my dad was building. He pulled his clothing on while we laughed and convinced ourselves we’d gotten away with it. We talked for a while about the ethics of what we’d done — neither of us felt particularly guilt-ridden — and waited until we felt sure that whoever had turned on the lights was asleep. Then we went back inside.

In the morning no adults gave any indication they’d seen anything. I assume they’re still blissfully ignorant regarding the transgressions between first cousins on an open front porch in small-town Alabama.

J.M.
Amherst, Massachusetts

No one spent much time on the front porch until I forbade smoking in the house. Then we put some chairs out there, and a coffee table with an ashtray, and the old couch, and a green dresser we didn’t have room for indoors. Before long my sixteen-year-old son, Ben, and his friends were hanging out on the porch every evening, smoking and drinking beer. A neighbor two houses down called the police whenever the kids stayed out there after ten. The police would drive by slowly with a floodlight and yell, “Keep it down!” The officers were probably as glad as I was to have the boys off the streets.

When Pat, my ex-husband, got sick and lost his place to live, he started sleeping on the old couch. The first morning I found him there, he apologized, and the next night he slept under the plum tree in the backyard. The kids and I agreed he could sleep on the porch while we looked for a place for him to stay. He would hoard food in the dresser and gripe about having been awakened by possums sniffing around for it. Then he started complaining about headaches and asking for cup after cup of coffee.

Pat was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and while he got care, my daughter Nora and I began to join Ben on the porch. Nora’s high-pitched, hysterical laugh brought the police quicker than ever. One night they said, “Couldn’t you just go inside?”

Pat died the following spring, and I repainted the porch, got rid of the couch and dresser, and bought some green plastic lawn chairs. A friend of Ben’s set up a grill in the driveway and taught Ben how to smoke salmon. I kept the scene under control by going out in my nightgown at 10 p.m. and standing there until everyone left.

As the years went by, Ben started a business selling newspaper subscriptions, and he and his subcontractors met on the porch in the late afternoons to relax with a smoke and a beer. One of his best salesmen was Dale, a Native American in his midfifties who spent long hours on the porch, philosophizing with anyone who would listen. Every time Dale saw me, he thanked me for letting him sit on my porch. He said it was a sacred spot. Ben told me Dale was fighting colon cancer and asked me to put up with him — it wouldn’t be for long. I did, and it wasn’t.

Now Ben lives with his girlfriend, but he and his friends still come over occasionally to sit on the porch and cook salmon. They’re of legal drinking age now, and better about using the ashtrays. The neighbor either has mellowed out or is losing his hearing. And I sleep right through it all.

Jean Gant
Seattle, Washington

In my last semester of college, I studied in India and kept an online journal so friends and family could keep up with my experiences. A stranger named Ruth found my journal by chance and became a regular reader of it. She was just a little younger than I was, and when I got back to the U.S., we started chatting by phone. Though I had decided to avoid entanglements with women for a while, Ruth and I became close. I was living with my parents that summer as I tried to find direction. With no job and few friends in the area, I was often depressed, and I’d question my worth. But I felt important to Ruth.

One day Ruth told me that another boy she’d been corresponding with had just died of a heart attack. She was inconsolable. He used to sing her to sleep over the phone, to help her deal with her insomnia and nightmares about her past. Now she asked me if I would sing to her.

I was not in the habit of singing for people, but Ruth’s persistence helped me overcome my anxiety. I went outside on the porch so no one else in the house would hear. It was dark and quiet on my suburban street, and the crickets were chirping as I sang Ruth a Smashing Pumpkins song called “Thirty-three.” She joked that my voice was terrible, but I could tell she was happy. I sang a few more songs I knew by heart, pausing after each to ask if she was still awake. She replied with progressively quieter cooing until she stopped responding altogether. Believing she had fallen asleep, I said good night and hung up. Before I could step into the house, the phone rang again.

“Alex?” Ruth said in a trembling voice. “I love you.”

“I love you, too,” I said.

I sang her to sleep two or three times a week after that. Later in the summer I visited her and held her all night on a hotel bed. Then we had a falling-out and stopped speaking to each other.

But I’ll never forget singing into the phone in the middle of the night on the porch of my parents’ house. On those nights I sang Ruth to sleep, I slept pretty well myself.

Alex Joppie
Chicago, Illinois

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