Sanctuary
Porches are the very best places, and my house has three, no four, all good. On the south side, two screen porches look out over St. Andrews Bay. The downstairs porch is cooler in summer; upstairs, Alfred’s Porch, has the better view, where before the trees grew that last inch or two I could see all the way across the Bay to Shell Island. This upstairs porch is developing some bad wood and we’re considering replacing the tongue-in-groove with new aluminum decking and replacing all four column bases.
There’s a gutter across the front. I put it there in 1993 or 1994 when the postman still brought mail to the front door and complained that when it rained he was getting drenched from water pouring off my upstairs porch roof. But as long as that acorn-to-oak-tree doesn't get too presumptuous there’s no way I’m getting up there to clean the gutter of a second story roof. A cardinal keeps landing on the gutter edge just in front of me, and I hear scratching sounds. Surely birds are too instinctive to build a nest in a gutter that would swamp in every rainstorm. Maybe they're waiting for the oak tree to mature.
On the other end of the house, the broad porch is the entry to our north front door. It’s open, not screened, and hosts my porch swing that Tass and Jeremy gave me for Father’s Day 1998. Round the corner from it is the new (2002) side screen porch that was first my breakfast porch, then for years the Cat Porch and is still called that, then with the Ascension of the final cat became my porch again. These sanctuaries can’t be used mid summer and deep winter, but fall and spring they are paradise. Now especially the almost totally silent XCat Porch which looks out on a lovely stacked garden Linda recently made and is still fashioning, with a hundred or so pots of plants and colorful flowers. It’s quiet here at the back corner; and over the fence and above the neighbor’s roof, a block away, grandiflora blossoms of a southern magnolia tree set in blue sky.
Why on Earth anyone would want to leave this World and go to Heaven beats the Hell out of me. Just sprinkle me in the Bay down front.
This is a quiet neighborhood. Sometimes. It was quieter in Alfred's day a hundred years ago before TAFB fighter jets deafeningly buzzed the house. They distinguish between noise and problem. There's noise but as long as they don't have red stars on the tail there's no problem.
This is a quiet neighborhood. Sometimes. It was quieter in Alfred's day a hundred years ago before TAFB fighter jets deafeningly buzzed the house. They distinguish between noise and problem. There's noise but as long as they don't have red stars on the tail there's no problem.
TW