Introducing Front Porch Memories.

When I was a kid almost a half-century ago, growing up on a farm outside the Finger Lakes town of Penn Yan, New York, summertime meant being outdoors all day and into the evening. As my grandmother had before us, my mother, sister, and I sat on the porch to shell freshly picked peas into pots clenched between our knees. Scents of lilac, trellised roses, and lily of the valley reached us from the bushes and flower beds my grandmother tended long ago.

Photo: My uncle Bruce, grandparents, and dad on the front porch of our farmhouse; 1934. Photo taken by my aunt, Blanche Bordwell Wyman.

After a hard day of work in the fields, my father and uncle would stretch out along the porch steps, cold long-necked bottles of Genessee Cream Ale in hand, hay chaff adhering to the sweat on their sunburned necks, to talk over the day’s frustrations – the tractor that wouldn’t start, the weather that wouldn’t cooperate – and make decisions about tomorrow’s chores.

Evening on the porch was the most enchanted time. A hush descended, then slowly filled with the chirrups and croaks of night creatures. The stars were brighter then, it seems, sharply sparkling, joined by the mysterious, intermittent twinkling of lightning bugs. We kids would dash around the lawn attempting to catch them in our cupped hands. One especially cherished night, my mother and I sat close together in the stillness of our porch and watched flashes of the aurora borealis light up the sky.

Our pleasures seem antiquated today, but we had fun with our imaginative, video-free play and slept soundly after. To me and many others, the porch is an emblem of that simpler, more “connected” life, a tangible reminder that seasonal outdoor living can link us to a greater, richer world of nature and imagination.