Permission & Porches
My friend Lee Durkee wrote this excellent article about his move to Taylor, MS and his newfound role as a hummingbird obsessive. You should read everything Lee writes, but I’ll link you to this specifically: https://gardenandgun.com/articles/a-miracle-of-hummingbirds/
I’m following (stealing?) Lee’s lead here. This morning, I want to talk to you about the porch.
Of the many reasons I often felt alone in Wyoming, I think one was the lack of being able to just sit outside. The weather rarely allowed for it, at maximum from June to September, but even when it did, there was nowhere for me to park my ass and be calm. My first apartment was in a crowded complex. My second, a carriage house, had a stoop, but also a loud, busybody landlord with whom I shared a yard (and a washer/dryer setup – the horrors I could tell you. The man left his underwear in there so many times). I never wanted to talk to him because he always made me uncomfortable, and he was almost always pittering about the yard, so I stayed inside, hiding. I could still hear him through the walls, they were so thin. He once got into a screaming match with the marine who lived in the house in front of me, and I tried not to leave the house for a week.
I was missing a private space. I was missing a porch.
Another reason why I picked this apartment I live in now was because of its small, screened in back porch. The plan was to set up plants back here, to spend long hours reading before the sun went down, to string lights up along the perimeter, to have parties where we would come out here to steal a moment's peace to gossip and smoke.
Of course, I haven’t done any of that, not really. I have two chairs and a table, and a drainer dish from a clay pot I use as an ashtray when friends are over. Which, if we’re being honest, is not a bad setup. I don’t have much time to get outside nowadays. I always seem to be rushing from one thing to the other, half exhausted and always disheveled. The porch feels like a reprieve, like a grounding.
Except that I haven’t been using it.
On lazy Saturdays when the weather began turning warm, I would sit with a beer or coffee, getting eaten up by mosquitos and letting Barry out to sit with me and watch the birds. He grew so accustomed to it, he would stand at the door in the kitchen and yowl, the yowl he uses when he’s in pain or feeling ill. He was absolutely sick for porch time.
When I was seeing someone over the past few months, late spring into summer, we spent a lot of time on the porch. We’d split a cigarette after we’d gone out, share a beer or a cocktail I’d made, steal a moment for coffee in the morning before I had to run off to work. We saw racoons and opossums and stray cats. He sometimes yelled when he got excited and I was worried my neighbors would say something. Occasionally, we turned the lights off and sat completely naked, when the night was warm enough.
And now, I haven’t been on the porch as much lately.
It’s definitely because I don’t have enough time, because I don’t like reading in the dark when all my work is finished around eight every night, that I haven’t been out there too much. I don’t smoke alone, so there’s no point in stealing a moment out there late at night. Maybe it’s the change in weather. I like fall, but when it comes to being outside, I have always preferred sweltering summer weather. I want the sun to beat down on me with a book in my hands. I don’t like to shiver. And so the porch sits, and I think of how sad I am that I have this space that is getting no use, except to store my potting soil and a bin of recyclables.
I feel cloistered as of late, like I’m in hiding, keeping myself separate and away. I am leaving the house for reasons other than work (once a week, at least), but something still feels off. I think I feel separated from my environment, like I’m not living in it but have instead been dropped squarely in the middle of it by surprise.
I envy Lee, his communion with the space around him. For me, I do not feel in communion. I feel confused, and the space, the buzzing, croaking patch my porch has built itself into, feels again like something I have to hide from, or request permission to inhabit.
I feel like an interloper, somehow.