Here's a piece I just wrote about somebody I've known for a long time and recently had a chance to visit.

A Visit on the Porch


Last weekend I spent some time at my parents’ house. On Saturday evening we decided to visit a couple of their church members in another town. Their names are Georgia and Eula. They are sisters, never married, who live together in the same house they have inhabited for over fifty years. Since their father died some years back they have lived there alone.

The house sits a way out of town atop a steep hill that looms twenty feet above the little rural road that runs by it. Huge old oaks grow on the hill. The house is a good-sized late Victorian place, all built of wood. It has a big bay window on one end and a porch that runs for about thirty feet across the side facing the road. The sisters’ father worked for the family that owned it for many years. It doesn’t strictly belong to them, but everyone I know thinks of it as theirs.

We got there just as it was turning dark. The sisters sat on the porch enjoying the evening breeze. They invited us up to join them. We walked around and up the five concrete steps to the big porch. Mom and Dad sat in the porch swing. I took one of the chairs.

The western sky across the road had that gentle glow the sky holds for a time after the sun goes down. We had plenty of light to see the porch by—the beaded ceiling and board floor, milled over a century ago, the five wooden pillars that supported the roof, the Victorian scroll-saw work at the tops of the pillars. At the end of the porch I could see through the open door of the house into a darkened room with a dim window on the other side. Though I have visited the house several times, I had not sat on that porch in many years. The last time was probably the evening when I was twelve or thirteen, when we took a couple of buckets of purple-hulled peas to run through the electric bean sheller they had borrowed from friends. That would have saved us so many hours of purple-fingered tedium if we had had access to it in previous harvest seasons!

Eula, polite but painfully shy as always, said very little. Georgia did all the talking. She told us some pieces of local news, talked about the odd occasion some neighbors had followed her home, and had quite a bit to say about the Canada geese that had visited recently at the pond on another neighbor’s property across the road. We swapped stories about ducks and geese for a while. This flock had stopped by on their way further south. A few had decided to make this area their wintering place.

As we visited, the sky’s evening glow faded to a deep blue and then to black. Through the clouds we saw bits of moon and star light. The main light now came from the outside floodlight near the driveway. We needed no lights on the porch itself, which had the effect of keeping us from drawing a swarm of mosquitoes and other unwanted visitors. The only bugs we were conscious of were the crickets who kept up their steady humming.

The cricket symphony and the mild evening air made it a virtually perfect porch scene. I had not had such a porch experience in…well, I don’t know when. I’ve got quite a few childhood memories of sitting on porches at the homes of family and family friends, usually older, visiting and listening to the crickets and katydids. Sometimes evenings like that bored me. My memories of them are usually very pleasant, though. Not all that many people now can say they have spent much time outside on the porch in the evening, with no more sound than their own voices and the insects and the very occasional passing vehicle. I’ve had all too little chance to do so as an adult, myself.

Georgia’s always interesting to listen to. She got very little education growing up, and spent many years working in a garment factory making Levis before the industry moved overseas. After that she went to Wal-Mart and worked there for a number of years before retiring at the age of eighty or so. It so happens that this evening’s visit was to congratulate her on her eighty-second birthday.

It might sound like she has lived a rather limited life in her eighty-two years, and yet you don’t get that impression talking to her. She and her friends have visited all over the state over the years. The array of places they’ve seen in their travels is amazing. And they still find new ones now and then. Almost every time I speak to her I hear about some barn or bridge or cemetery or other place of interest I’ve never heard about before. Once in a while when I have the chance I visit one of these places to see it for myself. I’ve been learning about these places for most of my life, ever since we drove all over the county with Georgia and her friend Mary Lou catching insects for the remarkably demanding insect collections our high school science teacher had my brother and me do (To get an A grade you needed at least 35 different species from 16 different orders, and a butterfly box).

Georgia still hunts every year, and still gardens. She has been trying to lure some of the squirrels that hang around her yard into her sights just recently. And she still mows her yard—another subject of conversation was how her riding mower recently gave out on her, and her efforts traveling far and wide to get it fixed.

We’ve had the privilege of eating some of the venison Georgia has helped to kill and the produce she has helped to raise. She is an amazingly generous person. She always has something for my brother’s daughters when they visit. She gets us something every Christmas. In return, there’s not really a whole lot we can give her and Eula. There isn’t a lot they seem to need, or at least we don’t hear anything about it. Mom brought Georgia some restaurant gift certificates for her birthday. They like to eat out pretty often.

As we prepared to leave, Georgia insisted on showing us a bois d’arc tree in the yard that had developed a vivid streak of torn bark after a recent storm. She clicked on the headlights of her truck under the carport so we could see the tree. She had wondered how in the world lightning could have caused such an odd streak. Dad figured out that the torn bark was actually caused by twisting of the tree in the wind. It must have been some wind!

As soon as I can I’m going to have to go back for another visit. This time I’ll have my camera and will ask permission to photograph the house. Even though it badly needs a paint job it is still a pretty house, and a wonderful photographic subject. I think Georgia and Eula would like having me take some pictures of it.

As I write this it occurs to me that everything I’ve described here is probably soon to pass away—the two sisters who have lived together for so long, the old house, the porch, the pleasure of sitting out on porches in the evening itself. I’m very thankful I’ve had another chance to renew my acquaintance with them all. A few pictures might help to cheat time for a little while longer.