Posted on Jan 6, 2021 in
On the Porch with Patti
New year – same Southern traditions. Join me on the porch – and sit a spell.
By Patti Parish-Kaminski, Publisher
Porches are a big thing in the South. A great deal of time is spent on the porch whether it’s visiting with neighbors, shelling peas, sipping sweet tea or simply watching the world go by. As a young girl, I learned that being on the porch with my grandmothers, aunts, mother and their friends was an education in all things. The key was to sit real quiet and be as unobtrusive as possible so when they started talking about the “good stuff,” they forgot you were there. That, my friends, is how I learned all about many things – life lessons, boys, marriage – but mainly, spilling the tea.
My family is a Southern Baptist, God-fearing bunch from rural Northern Louisiana – the kind of ladies who clean the church, ask the preacher over for Sunday dinner and who wouldn’t say a dirty word even if they had a mouth full of it. But, let the ladies gather together on a porch, and no topic was off-limits. In fact, being on the porch with my female elders was much more informative than the weekly newspaper when it came to community happenings.
The transformation of these upstanding good Christian ladies during porch time was always quite remarkable to me. It reminds me of the Latin phrase that Larry McMurtry placed on the Hat Creek Cattle Company sign: “uva uvam vivendo varia fit.” It means, literally, a grape changes color or ripens when it sees another grape. When these ladies got together, they changed from angelic white to somewhat aubergine.
It’s a tradition that I sorely miss. I do, however, admit to having a porch or two in my life. I never really understood why having a porch – a private space to meditate, read or simply be – was so important to me. Now that I’m full-grown, I get it. My porch is filled with the memories of the porches of my youth – a chair with a deer hide seat that Mawmaw tanned and stitched the hide, my Pawpaw’s rocking chair that spent my entire childhood on his front porch, the table where my children ate and colored as babies. I often sit on my porch and call friends, enjoy a glass of wine or read a book. I guess you could say I have a pondering porch, because it is where I go to think and enjoy the majestic outdoors. Now my outdoors is only majestic because my porch is screened in so no mosquitos are admitted, and it boasts a huge ceiling fan to combat our heat and humidity. And I mentioned there’s wine, right? Nevertheless, it’s my place, my space, and for 2021, I want to share my porch with y’all.
I hope that some time on my porch will be as entertaining as it was to me growing up. I’ll share some insights, tell some tales and of course, spill a little tea now and then. I invite you to pull up a chair and sit a spell. And welcome to my porch.
