My dad never met a front porch he didn’t like. Curious, then, that he never had one in the Ocala homes he built as a residential contractor. His front entrances usually consisted of a few concrete steps leading up to an entry barely big enough to hold a plant, let alone a rocking chair. Yet, he often waxed poetically about what he called “front porch living.”
“Porches were an extension of the living room. During the long, hot summer days and nights, families moved out to the porches, especially at night. After supper was over and the dishes washed, you sat on the front porch and talked,” Dad wrote in this very newspaper many years ago.
In addition to being a darn good builder, Dad was also a writer. He penned a few self-published books about living in Ocala, serving our country and the Allied forces in World War II, as well as about falling in love with a local girl he met in his teens while swinging on her dad’s front porch swing.
“Young folks would dream dreams, swing miles and miles. Most of their courting would be done on the front porch swing,” Dad wrote. “Nelwyn’s father was a deacon in the Baptist church. After church on Sunday night, they would usually have a called deacon’s meeting. We ran home so we could have a few moments alone on the front porch swing.”
Mama turns 94 this week. She’s been without Dad for a long time. I keep one of his books in my purse to read to her when I visit her at the nursing home. I select a few passages from my favorites of the first of his multiple book collection, “The Story Pole.”
Dad would totally get a kick of thinking he had a literary collection. He wrote this book in his mid-50s when work and life slowed down enough for him to pound out thoughts on his typewriter in his home office next to a pile of architectural sketches of building projects. A friend copyedited, and another friend printed a few hundred copies. He sold out within a week. Later, he printed a few more copies at a local office supply store, some with the pages upside down. I possess a few of these versions and love them for their publishing imperfection.
Sometimes, the words I read to Mama don’t resonate; other times, they do. Without fail, her connection is always when it’s about her relationship with Dad. When I ask her about courting on the porch, she smiles, but says nothing. Maybe that’s how it should be, time locked just between the two of them.
Nothing reminds you of fleeting days and nights than caring for an elderly parent. I am my father’s age when he penned the story I now read to his widow.
“The days of rocking chairs, swings, front porches, the good times, the bad times and the quiet ties have come to pass and gone on,” Dad remembered. “This way of life will never be the same. We who were there will smile and remember when the whippoorwill sang.”
Dad may have never had a front porch, but he perfectly captured the essence of what it meant to have a sacred place to commune and dream.
For this, I wish my mother the happiest of days. And to my father, I remain forever grateful for the reminder of finding solace at home, be it a front porch or the memory of one.
