Welcome to The Heartland Album

When the houses in my boyhood neighborhood were built in the early 1900s there was no air conditioning.
(I know! You knew that! I just had to say it). Builders arraigned houses so that the summer evening activities could take place on the coolest side of the house. Look at the houses on the south side of the street! All of the porches are on
the left - the east. Look at the houses on the north side of the street! All of the porches are on the right - the east.

When our family moved into our house in the mid 1930s the side porch was a concrete slab floor, a stucco ceiling and
a wall bumped out for the living room fire place. Four square wood columns held up the second floor sleeping porch.
A broad flat railing between the columns was a bench for us kids to sit on and dangle our feet. That's all there was to do.

The first winter swept through this wide open shelf. It was no fun. The next spring storms were to experience as they swished the wind and rain from all directions. Summer changed things. A wood porch swing soon dangled from the ceiling. The porch became our pirate ship. Never mind that the starboard side was a stucco wall. South was the only direction we could sail. We debarked and embarked anywhere we chose along the port side. On those hot summer days we sailed not before the moan of the wind but the sound of our neighbor lady to the east practicing her vocal exercises.

Our neighbors to the west had long since transformed their porch into a screen cocoon. We kids would look from our breakfast room window across the space between houses to see our parents playing bridge. Darkness drenched everything but that porch, a gem that glowed with its green furnishings on the summer evenings. The porches on the other side of the street and on the row of houses strung along the block at our backs were islands of summer activity. Lights glowed dimly above, through and around shrubbery. Laughter drifted gently from them.

Our own porch began to evolve in the coming years. Sisal rugs rippled over the floor. We would sit with our bare thighs pressed against the floor, then stand and view, with fascination, the wrinkled imprint on our bottoms. Wicker furniture turned our porch into a daytime sitting room, Dad's place to read the evening paper. Summer evening card games, though, called for square bridge tables and folding chairs. Our porch grew its own screen cocoon. Then bamboo curtains hunched in rolls at the lintels were held up with halyards tied in figure eight loops around pot metal hooks. The screens and curtains took the thrill out of summer storms. In the winters the furnishings were shoved against the west wall and stacked inverted on each other. The floor lamp with its wide wicker shade went to the basement. In the spring one of my great delights was to move the furniture away from the wall and power-wash off the winter dirt with the garden hose.

A recent cruse through the neighborhood presented interesting revelations. Many side porches are as they were, screened to keep out summer bugs but open to the evening breeze. There's one with a ceiling fan to grind out a
synthetic zephyr. Some porches were still there, but with plate glass walls to preserve an open view of the yard yet
hold in conditioned air. Others had been permanently transformed into indoor rooms with an exterior building, hiding
all but the obvious outlines of the old pillars and lentils and arches. But there! That one! Look I It's still the way it was
80 years ago. Gleaming clean white paint.  Hanging baskets of cascading vines. Boxes of flowers snuggled against
the pillars. A prism chandelier. Shrubbery neatly trimmed so as not to obstruct the view of or from this proud old porch.