A Front Porch Neighborhood
I live in a front porch neighborhood. On the kind of street where most houses have the big, covered front porches with swings or patio sets. On our street, people treat their porches like an extra room. A place to be enjoyed, experienced, lived in.
We don’t have block parties or planned neighborly get togethers. Some neighbors are good friends and probably do make plans to hang out. But it doesn’t feel that way. It feels like the neighborly interactions just sort of happen, when people are hanging out on their porches.
Some people say hi when you walk by with your dog, and occasionally you stop where you are on the sidewalk for a conversation. But most of the time, it’s just a quick hello before everyone gets back to doing their own thing.
Other people don’t say hi. And that’s fine. There is no rule that says they have to. Their porch is a space in their home, and you wouldn’t expect someone to cheerfully wave from their living room after they caught you blatantly staring in their window.
On our street, front porches are living rooms and have dining room tables. They are coffee shops where you quietly catch up with friends or open your laptop for a few hours. They are home offices and neighborhood bars where people laugh loudly late on weekend nights. Our front porches are a place where, life happens.
I don’t know that many neighbor’s names. We’ve lived here for seven years, and I don’t know if I’d recognize who lives here or who’s visiting if we weren’t a front porch neighborhood. I doubt I’d attend the block parties or summer holiday potlucks if they were a thing on our street. Those kinds of events give me anxiety and will probably never be my jam. But front porches are great for me. They let me say hello and then carry on with my day.
Some front porches look the same as the day we moved in. The same furniture with the same people spending time on them. But most have changed at least a little bit. Renovation projects and new paint. New chairs and tables, sometimes with new people sitting on the new furniture. People have come and gone. Others have grown older with time. The once little kids now head off for school, and the not so young walk by slower than they used to.
The front porches change, little by little, but they always stay. Ours is one of the ones that looks different since we’ve moved in. But for more than a hundred years, our porch was here before us. A place where life happened on our street. Surrounded by all the other front porches and all the living that happened over a century.
If our front porches could tell their own stories, I wonder what they’d talk about. I wonder if they’d gossip about the neighbors. Or if they’d prefer to talk about the life lived on their own boards and under their own roofs. They might brag about the work they’ve had done or the meticulous maintenance by their people, but somehow I doubt it.
If our front porches could tell their own stories, I think they’d talk about their people. The families they’ve raised, growing from two people to groaning happily under the weight of more. I think they’d talk about what it feels like to have only one rocking chair sway with the weight of one person while the second chair sits too light and too still nearby.
I think they’d talk about being content knowing the patterns of one family, then the quiet and still when they leave. The times of many pairs of unknown feet walking in and out, until new sets start to feel worn and familiar. I wonder if all porches find it exciting to learn new life patterns of new people, or if some porches feel anxious about the changes.
If our front porches could tell their own stores, I’d love to sit in one of their chairs and listen.
