The Back Porch: A lost legacy

Back when indoor heat was often portable and air conditioning was a novelty, screen doors and wooden porches gave life a sense of balance and reality. Sure, everyone sweated and mopped their foreheads in the summer (it wasn't so much the heat as the humidity), and linoleum floors got mighty cold on icy mornings. But we lost something good when old-fashioned screen doors and porches gave way to climate-controlled living sealed by airlocks and guarded by sterile aluminum storm doors.

My favorite screened porch was tacked to the back of my grandparents' home in rural Mississippi. During my childhood, the porch evolved from an uncovered wooden platform that held the (first manual, later electric) water pump, to a screened and covered extension of the house with a bathroom added off to one side. You had to exit the back door and make a trip through the screened porch to "use the facilities." Prior to that addition, the 'facilties' were outside.

A collection of rockers and lawn chairs eventually furnished the porch, and before long, every generation of the household used it as a gathering place. It was the tribal meeting ground for the menfolk, the playhouse for me and my cousins, and where the women in the family assembled to swap gossip.

In summer, the back door stayed open, the screened porch protecting the house from flies and at least the biggest chunks of red-clay dirt from outside. The creak of the screen door's wire spring -- a metallic twang that would crescendo to its highest pitch, then release the door (thwack!) to slam shut -- announced to all that someone had "come to set and visit." It was as good as any doorbell, and twice as friendly. Visitors were a welcome break in routine, an excuse to sit and rock on the porch and talk the heat away over tall glasses of iced tea or cold lemonade made from real lemons.

We kids preferred to chase the heat by sneaking illicit sips from the water pail, right out of the ladle. Since indoor plumbing was only installed late in the life of my grandparents’ cabin, a metal pail of spring water, with a ladle in it, always sat on a wooden shelf by the back door. That water, with its slightly tinny taste, was the coolest, most refreshing drink in the world -- if sipped from the ladle, that is. In a token effort to inspire sanitary drinking habits, a glass sat next to the pail. My uncles brazenly ignored the house rules and drank right from the ladle without retribution. We kids, however, got strong verbal reprimands if we were caught ladle-lapping, which only made it more tempting.

Life viewed from the screened porch was up close and personal, because anyone holding court there had a front-row seat to everything that happened in the house. The sounds and smells coming from the cookstove just inside the open doorway told you what was being readied for mid-day dinner or evening supper long before you sat down to the oilcloth-covered wooden table. Frequently, my grandmother and aunts sat on the porch while cleaning peas or green beans for the family meal, the sharp staccato of the pods snapping in two alternating with metallic clinks as they were tossed into enameled pans held in apron-covered laps.

The porch was situated in a way that put every conversation on the one-and-only household phone within easy hearing distance. Worse yet, if you had a date, you had to walk past the whole family to get spruced up in the bathroom. I was subjected to many editorializing comments about various suitors from my uncles, brothers and male cousins while walking that gauntlet.

You could tell what God and Mother Nature were up to each season just by walking out on that porch. It offered a slight barrier to the dust and heat on hot, dry days, and on cloudy days, it let in the cool damp aroma that signaled an impending Southern rainstorm. In warm weather, the perfume from fat magnolia blossoms filled your nostrils. In the fall, the pecan leaves that covered the yard rustled in breezes that were just crisp enough to send you for your sweater or a thick flannel shirt if you wanted to greet the dawn while contemplatively nestled in one of the wooden rockers.

On muggy summer nights, my large collection of cousins and I tried to postpone bedtime by chasing fireflies under the tall pines that lined the yard while the adults solved world issues, sipping coffee and munching on the last of that morning’s breakfast biscuits (slathered with thick fig preserves) as they watched us from the porch. The whir of cicadas and the thunk of June bugs hitting the screens provided a background to their soft conversations, which were often punctuated by good-natured joking and laughter. Colder nights sent everyone indoors sooner, but the balmier winter months still offered many pleasant evenings behind the screens.

Back then, most rural homes and even a few businesses used propane or butane space heaters in the winter, strategically placed to give you heat only when and where you wanted. Summer was different. A few stores in town boasted of air conditioning, luring people through their doors with icicle-draped letters: "It's coool inside!" Most private homes had only the standard bulbous brown oscillating fan and maybe, if they were lucky like we were, a screened porch to offer relief to the heat.

But over the years, that thing called progress came along. Most of the stores installed real air conditioning, and before long, it was rumored that even some of the big new houses just outside of town actually had central heating and air units. Pretty soon, a house just wasn’t worth living in if it wasn’t sealed up tight like a box or something.

I guess that depends, though, on where a person’s coming from. With so many of my childhood memories centered around that sagging wooden porch, I kinda feel sorry for those folks.