corners of my home: front porch

This is the time of year when our porch is our favorite room in the house. One of our annual rites of spring is bringing the porch furniture up from the basement, washing it, and sweeping and mopping the porch floor to inaugurate our season of outdoor living.

There is so much to love about porch life. I admire the way that, though all the porches on our street are different, they share a sameness of size and proportion so that looking down the row of them is a little like looking down a patchwork colonnade.

In porch season, this is where we eat all our meals, play, read, hang out, and chat with passing neighbors. It is from the porch that Iris conducts her census of neighborhood dogs and urban wildlife. There are squirrels, of course (which she calls “Eichhörnchen” – since we visited relatives in Austria last year, she has a small but eccentric German vocabulary), and robins and cardinals, but also goldfinches who visit our sunflowers and even a local resident hawk. Once J and Iris saw a raccoon. I know, more disgusting than delightful is what you’re thinking, but if you’re two years old and have only seen them before in books, the thrill is akin to sighting a celebrity in the grocery store. Her father was also impressed. “I see raccoon,” Iris reported to me later. “Daddy say ‘Holy cow!’”

More corners here.