Sometime after supper and well before bedtime, I move instinctively through the front door and out onto the porch. I take my seat in a green Adirondack, stack my heels on the railing, lean back and take in the show.
Our porch overlooks a wide sagebrush plain framed by rolling hills and white-capped craggy peaks beyond. Clouds gather mostly above the mountains and when the sun settles westward they blush in hues of pink and orange and even purple. Some evenings they glow from within, illuminated by bolts of lightning.
Many folks plan their evenings around TV sitcoms or a sports broadcast; I hate to miss the sunset from my front porch. There are legions of passionate porch people who share my porch sentiments, if not my porch view. They have started a trend that is making porches fashionable again.
The word "porch" used to evoke images of Wicker chairs, porch swings, and tall glasses of cold lemonade. Porches were places to retreat to during a summer rain or to relax with a good book. They were places meeting friends, talking, knitting, shelling peas, courting, or a hundred other activities.
The front porch was usually a place for gathering, but there were also side -- or service -- porches for deliveries, sleeping porches off master bedrooms, and air porches off a hall or bathroom where the laundry could dry and a dust mop or rug could be shaken out.
Between 1890 and 1930, houses throughout America were frequently constructed with porches of one sort or another, but the last half century brought about changes in society and technology --- television and air conditioning, especially -- that carried people away off the porch and back inside.
Today, most porches are built for style rather than function, but more new homes have them and folks are rediscovering their powerful potential. Porches can be like box seats to the game of life or the grand theater of nature, but they can also be very social. Neighbors will make a porch visit far more often than they will knock on a door. Porches are inviting; doors are forbidding. I would much rather entertain, or be entertained, on an open-air porch than in any formal setting. As Garrison Keillor once wrote, a porch should be a place where you are "able to spill your coffee without deep remorse."
Words read better, coffee tastes better, and birds sound better out here. Work is never a labor, solitude is never lonely, and conversation is never forced. If there were more porches, and porch people using them, there would be less need for pulpits and preachers, police and prisons.