They are friends of my husband, friends from college, Alan and Cookie.
Cookie and Alan live in West Virginia. Alan is an architect and Cookie is a retired professor of French from Sweet Briar College. Cookie, a native Syracusan, has maintained her family’s home in Liverpool since her parents passed on, visiting several times a year as a kind of retreat. When they are here, we try to catch up, sometimes at the Liverpool house, sometimes a restaurant, sometimes at our camp.
They arrived a few days ago.
This time we decided to invite them to our home for a dinner, nothing elaborate, since elaborate has gone the way of short shorts and bathing suits in my lexicon and practice. But something casual and nice, with emphasis on nice, since that isn’t a category much used these days.
The weather, as we all know, has been erratic and when the erratic runs into humidity in the 70s, in a house without AC, I eschew most of anything in favor of sitting in front of one of our many fans and vegging … but at our station in life, missing out on time with friends takes precedence over much of what else there is.
How to accommodate friends and climatic discomfort?
Why, our front porch, of course.
Our porch. It’s wide enough for four chairs and a glider, the latter needing a lot of work, but I think I can pull off a shabby chic vibe there. I’ll pull some of the impatiens from our patio out onto the wide railings of the porch for an attempt some kind of décor, a bright red against a very conservative gray-green. The porch is surrounded by trees, a burning bush, two apple trees, a wildly-out-of-trim viburnum and a dogwood. To be truthful, this summer’s climatic events have caused these landscaping beauties to grow without limits and I am thinking that I had better call someone who knows how to trim them without doing damage to their ability to provide privacy to those on our porch. That will be next week. But for now, I think that we can facilitate a casual “nice.”
And so, with some simple hors d’oeurves and Ina Garten’s recipe for Cosmos, the time passed as if it hadn’t. Our lives had branched in so many different ways and yet we were still the young, striving achievers dressed in, to paraphrase Billy Joel, an old person’s clothes.
Mixed in with descriptions of balance issues, doctor’s advice and so forth, we still brought the Peace Corps, teaching, summers in Paris, children who left home for Europe or Georgia or Rochester or Cazenovia, with grandchildren often seen and not often seen, siblings’ and mutual acquaintances’ lives, innovative architectural ideas and stained glass and …memories of silly times and poignant events… all jumbled together in the back and forth conversations on the porch.
We did eventually go inside to eat dinner, but the warmth of that simple time amidst the overgrown landscaping and soft late August breezes was more special than anticipated.
The porch was perfect, or at least as close as I could come that day.
I’ve often wondered why people removed porches. You can see the houses where that has been done and somehow the houses look less. A porch serves the purpose of summer. It is where you can be alone and let the lists of responsibilities slide for a time. It’s where friends can gather their memories and share validation that friendship offers.
I am sure that there are other ways to engender these moments, but having a porch makes it easy.
