Front Porch Chronicles

It's the end, the end of summer.  Our summer has been filled with so many ups and downs.  Looking back, the center of our summer story is our front porch.  Here is that story or what I like to call our Front Porch Chronicles.  On Memorial Day, Tim built a table out of a door to use on our front porch.  This table brought our porch to life like it was full of magic. 

We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner on this door that is now a table on our front porch.  Rain or shine, it was where we ate. 

We read books on our front porch.  I sobbed my way through the end of Where the Red Fern Grows (no spoiler alert, but damn, if you are the least bit sensitive be prepared) and started the Harry Potter series on our porch.

We played and played and played....
Hours of Rummikub.

And make-believe.

And a little bit of Monopoly.

I think it probably says a lot about me (and my disinterest in buying and selling) that I make up the rules to this game to make it more fun.

And Barbies.

We consoled and comforted, loved and supported each other on our front porch.  

We made big decisions (like keeping our puppy).  Grown ups had serious talks alone on the front porch about how much money could and would be spent on big stuff (like the puppy).  Kids had "time outs" on the porch when they hit their brothers or used the wrong tone to a grown up.  And did I mention we ate, a lot, on the porch?

Birthdays, friendship and anniversaries were celebrated on the porch with cake and presents and parties.

And since the front porch is our front porch, um, well there was music and there was dancing.

If we weren't watching the kids playing baseball together in the front yard, we were watching the major league players on TV through our window.  

We got stronger. We talked about our future, you know like middle school and fourth grade and football games and new friends and what that all looks like.  

We built things and figured things out.  Yeah, sometimes it was just banging nails into a piece of wood for the hell of it, but it felt good and we were together.

Being together, that's why it was our happy place, our home base.  That was the magic.  Our whole life was on that front porch.  

It wasn't this perfect-looking space, impeccably decorated with expensive pillows and candles.  

This banner is made of paper and taped to the siding with packing tape.  When it would get too humid the paper would curl up and the tape would lose all stickiness.  We just got more tape and back up the paper banner went.

If you look closely, you will see it's all kinds of imperfect.  The wicker chairs are broken but we still use them, we had an ant invasion twice, too many bees sometimes and it was always littered with sports equipment.  But the magic still happened.  

                    

"If we move, I want to build a porch just like this wherever we go," Lucy said at one point in the summer.  

"Oh you know it honey," I told her.  
You better believe we are taking this kind of front porch/door turned into a table/happy family  magic with us wherever we go, forever and always.

Here's where else we were this summer...

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