usadeepsouth.com
Grandmother's Front Porch
by Jan Risher
My grandmother had a front porch.
Screened in, squeaky hinges on the door and all. The porch had a massive dining room window, my perfect secret passageway. It wasn't a big, luxurious porch with icy drinks and lemon wedges like you'd see in a glossy
magazine.
Her porch was small and slightly dark. It was relatively cool, especially the smooth (and usually damp) concrete floor. It was crowded with furniture that someone somewhere didn't think fit to keep, but my grandmother doctored, decorated and declared each piece "good as new."
I started choosing to spend time on the porch in preschool and returned frequently until I finished college and moved away. As years passed, I realized that I was the only family member who went there regularly. I rearranged the furniture according to season. I gathered the sales pamphlets and local political fliers that accumulated inside the rusted door pull. I swatted the pollen of the Mississippi spring off the chaise lounge's crackly plastic cushion. I recognized the wonders of this place.
My friends and I spent considerable time left to our own devices on my grandmother's porch. Our parents didn't set up color-coded trays brimming with activities: beads to build finger dexterity, watercolors to enhance our artistic nature, magnets to promote scientific curiosity. Nope, during those long, unstructured marvelous afternoons, we were on our own.
Soccer moms and dads of the day (myself included) take increasing responsibility in organizing children's "down" time. There's such a fine line between shaping children who are creative thinkers and shaping those who are overly dependent -- socially, intellectually and emotionally. Children (and their parents) don't always need the newest, shiniest wondergadget. Occasionally, it's okay for children (and their parents) to be bored and under-stimulated, having to figure out how to entertain themselves.
Aside from tending to me, my grandmother sewed for other people. She would pass small pieces of fabric through the window to me on my perch on her porch. I created wrap-around skirts and shirts for dolls and animals. As I grew, I made more elaborate outfits, tiny pillows and quilts, stitching them together with progressively smaller needles. None of them were very good. In fact, they were plain raggedy, but I thought that at any moment the folks from Butterick were going to call seeking advice for their fall line.
When my friends and I gained the independence bicycles offered decades ago, my grandmother's porch became our social center.
We played cards. Occasionally we found a complete deck, but generally we scrounged for miss-matched jacks and sevens, using ball-point pens to add extra clubs and diamonds.
We sold lemonade until my mother started charging us for sugar.
When we learned multiplication, we played Yahtzee. Then Scrabble and Charades.
We painted each other's toenails with shades certain to make our parents screech.
But mostly, my friends and I talked. We talked about all the money we could make if we opened a florist using the wildflowers growing in the ditches. We talked about the books we read. We talked about our mothers. We talked about the dreamy lifeguards at the lake. We talked and talked and talked some more. Until our bellies growled and there was nothing to do but ride our bikes home and prepare for another long, lazy afternoon on my grandmother's front porch.
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New to USADEEPSOUTH.COM, Jan Risher tells us about herself:
"I wrote a monthly parenting column for the El Paso Times in El Paso, Texas. In November, I moved back to the Deep South with my family. I currently write a weekly parenting column that appears on Sundays in Lafayette, Louisiana's The Daily Advertiser."
Write Jan at janrisher@aol.com.
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