By Linda Lee Greene, Author & Artist
Ten summers have gone by since my family last gathered on the front porch of my grandparent’s farmhouse, the place that forms the thread of our mutual existence. Seven years later, there was no longer a farmhouse to go home to for the reason that it fell to a stranger’s wrecking ball. The land on which it nestled was given over to great herds of another family’s roaming cattle. I wonder at times what became of the ancient wood planks that shaped the structure of the farmhouse. The new owners chose not to rebuild and live there. Humanity has vanished from the place, it seems. I wonder as well what the consciousness that comprises the earth of the compound senses about this change. Does it embrace the simplicity of the clobber of cow’s hooves, or hold close to the hectic comings and goings of the feet of its former human inhabitants?
I have old and copious memories of my maternal grandparent’s farm. They are sometimes hard to retrieve, but at other times they shimmer before my eyes like many-hued butterflies. It is the front porch of the farmhouse that is the main repository of my recollections, however—the porch with its swing at its farthest end, its housebound wall lined with an odd array of kitchen chairs, its raised floor that was the ideal height for sitting along its edge.
Summer, fall, and spring, tilted back on one of the chairs, my grandfather held court on the porch, his voice booming out a story interspersed among a catalog of events typical of a small Ohio farm. Level-browed, high cheekbones sweeping, his flaring red hair an unruly cap, all were Scotch-Irish shoots of his genetic past. He seemed perpetually misplaced in the low foothills of his Appalachian digs, for his rail-boned legs were made for long strides up loftier southern peaks scaled by his mountain highland ancestors. His opposite in type, in body and manner, prematurely roan of hair, sunbaked forearms and face continually busy, my grandmother seemed permanently attached to an earthenware bowl sunk in her ample lap. With German-Irish facility, her hardworking fingers snapping her garden-harvested green beans or peeling her potatoes, the porch provided respite from her breathless kitchen. Shy young boys and girls strangely artful in romance beyond their years and milieu’s range, courted on that porch swing, the two who became my parents among them. Giddy kids and lazy dogs sprawled out on their bellies, congregated on the front porch floor. Their bodies were a squirming mass of country curiosity. Weekend reunions, impromptu concerts, quilting bees, barbering and bartering station, the front porch was the center of my family’s life then, as across all of America.
There is little or no romance about today’s American front porches. Thanks to Covid-19, a wave, a hurried word, families that are quarantined and virus-fatigued social distance from their neighbors on today’s front porches. The role that front porches assume in American life from here is open to speculation. Might they arise as tiny pricks of light in the gloom, porches lining boulevards, highways, skyways, porches climbing towers, clinging to farmhouses, masses of front porches with lights switched on to follow into an improved future? “Fireflies in Indonesia numbering in the millions are able to synchronize their flashes over an area of several square miles.”[1] I presume they do this in support of some sort of survival action. If fireflies can do it, then why can’t we?©
#Front
Porch; #Americana, #Ohio; #Farm Life; #Farmhouse; #GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS;
#Linda Lee Greene; #Multi-award-winning author
Image:
Three Generations of a Family, Summer 2010
Multi-award winning author, Linda Lee Greene’s GUARDIANS AND OTHER ANGELS, a cross-genre novel of historical fiction and memoir, enjoys a host of 5 star reviews, one of which states: “5 stars - Wonderfully Written! This was a thoroughly enjoyable book. I loved the Americana. [It] reached out & touched my heart, mind & soul. [It] provided tremendous insight into what many American families endured during the first half of the 20th century. It captures you and draws you in. This is most certainly a five-star novel.”
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