Highlights
In The American Porch: An Informal History of an Informal Place, Michael Dolan shares that in researching his book he discovered that what he thought was as American as “a greenback dollar” turned out to be instantiated across epochs and cultures. What Dolan learned notwithstanding, there remains something powerfully American about front porches—even when they don’t have the signature American flag flapping in the breeze.
As we reflect on the 250th anniversary of our nation’s heritage, front porches offer an excellent object for consideration. Their true significance, both historically and towards a renewal of things we hold dear, lies most in how they can exemplify truly human life. Much can be said about their social significance beyond the boundaries of home. Porches serve in numerous ways to foster a sense of belonging, connection, communication, and responsibility toward the broader community. But my present interest is in the crucial role of porches—or some other space that might stand in for them—in fostering a fully human life within the household itself.
In his 1852 book Rural Architecture, Lewis Allen wrote:
no feature of the house in a southern climate can be more expressive of easy, comfortable enjoyment than a spacious veranda. The habits of southern life demand it as a place of exercise in wet weather in the cooler seasons of the year, as well as a place of recreation and social intercourse during the fervid heat of the summer. Indeed, many southern people almost live under the shade of their verandas. It is a delightful place to take their meals, to receive their visitors and friends.1
While Allen’s ‘verandas’ were probably upper-class porches, the porches of other classes surely had a similar role. Harry Watson, Atlanta Distinguished Professor of Southern Culture at UNC Chapel Hill, recalls that when he was a door-to-door salesman in college in Alabama: “I went around town, and every afternoon by about 4 o’clock, people would be on the front porch shelling beans for dinner.”2
Porch Time
In thinking about homelife, and what we might learn from the past, I use the term ‘porch-time’ to refer to a set of key human activities that can take place in a number of contexts. I think the name is fitting because the front porch exemplifies these activities, even if for many today it can no longer provide such a context. Porch-time stands for the ‘ordinary’ in human life in the best sense of the term: those things that constitute an amazing day-to-day flourishing in human life.
Andrew Lyttle warned almost a century ago that it had become necessary to defend the ordinary before it vanished.3 This ordinary is anything but dull or lackluster. It is ordinary because, as the heart of our common inheritance, it is how we cultivate and express who we are as rational animals, designed for virtuous living, for dwelling in the presence of loved ones, and for communing with the divine.
But as a society we have largely abandoned or lost the ordinary as we gravitate to the new, the glitzy, the progressive. Perhaps like never before, we can now recognize that the ordinary demands to be defended, that our birthright is constantly threatened by a mess of pottage presenting as the edgy or exciting.
True leisure and good work are connected at their roots, each arising from and leading back to the other.
Porch-time at its best is a key expression of a wise tradition called ‘leisure:’ those times of plenitude, or simple activities of irreplaceable worth that stem from how they fulfill our deepest desires. The wise also know that true leisure and good work are connected at their roots, each arising from and leading back to the other. It is no wonder, then, that the porch can also be a place of work, usually work of the hands, such as shelling beans for dinner.
My point is not to canonize the front porch as some sort of talisman, magically productive of happiness. Rather, I suggest that reflecting on the place of the front porch in the not-so-long-ago history of many of our communities gives occasion for recognizing the critical importance of certain ways of living together as human persons, of living in the presence of others, every day, beginning in our homes. In their basic outlines, these ways of being at leisure and at work are expressive of who we are; they should be and can again become ordinary.
Suggested Action Steps
In my new book, The Intentional Household: Living as if People Matter, I suggest more porch-time as a way to renew our homes and specifically as a way to enact real leisure time as the center of our family life. Two of five suggested action steps in chapter 4, excerpted below, discuss how we might do ‘porch-time’ today, whether on a porch or not.
1. Make together time
Country singer Tracy Lawrence has a song in which the refrain is, “If the world had a front porch like we did back then . . .” What might be an instance of nostalgia nonetheless expresses a rather profound insight, as well as a memory still deep within many Americans. Not so long ago, porch-time was a regular part of people’s lives, and it was more significant than we realized.
It can be hard to explain porch-time to those who have not experienced something like it. A meal or tea or dessert might be shared. Certain kinds of work—such as handcrafts of husbandry and housewifery—might regularly grace this space. But what most characterized porch-time was being together and talking.
A young person today might genuinely wonder what a family had to talk about at such length. This stands to reason, for apart from such a space in one’s own day, one might never know. For such contexts cultivate something in us, forming habits of being together in the most human way—as rational, conscious, sensitive, persons: We notice, listen, comprehend, and share. This is the human way of being in the world, and it begins to reveal why human life is always a story: something to be told and heard.
This brings us to the next point.
2. Make story time.
Stories are at the heart of leisure time, because leisure is at root about seeing and understanding reality. Human life is always a story, a sequence of events that have a plot and an end. The lives of persons or characters are interwoven threads of free choices and unexpected challenges and gifts.
The perspective of religion only heightens the drama. The human story is not a stand-alone, as it intersects in profound and even stunning ways with the divine. The issue of the Author of our story becomes freighted with richer implications.
Human life is always a story: something to be told and heard.
The telling of stories, whether true or fictional, is how human persons reckon with the surprising and stark realities of life, then come to recognize their own place in the world. Telling and hearing stories is part and parcel of living the human story in a conscious and rational mode. A good story—and we have always recognized that some are better than others, in both form and content—is a vehicle of self-discovery. It can give context and perspective to the seemingly disconnected threads of daily life.
Certain stories in Western Civilization have been deemed especially potent and worthy of attention. Becoming conversant in these is a kind of introduction and foundation for the whole realm of story and life. In Jewish and Christian traditions, the Scriptures provide a narrative that is the context of all narratives. Time tested epics, ballads, fairy stories, and cautionary tales offer perspective and principles for life. The family in each household has its own unique history, with the usual ups and downs, and heroes and villains. Passing on family history and stories helps give context for discovering one’s own particular place in life.
Finding time to enter these stories takes effort. It is a way of carving out real leisure time.*
As we look for ways to strengthen family and home life in America, reflecting on the significance of front porches can inspire us to rediscover and enact rich forms of together-time. Whether this time together takes place on a front porch or not, such activities speak to our deepest human desires and can transform our homes and communities.
John Cuddeback’s new book The Intentional Household: Living as if People Matter is available here and wherever you get books. He writes at LifeCraft, offering principles and encouragement for renewing life in the home. You can find his podcast,“The Intentional Household,” here.
*Excerpt ends.
1. Richard L. Perry, “The Front Porch as Stage and Symbol in the Deep South,” Journal of American Culture 8, no. 2 (Summer 1985).
2. Quoted in: Scott Jared, “Front Porch Revival,” The Well, UNC-Chapel Hill College of Arts and Sciences, 5/18/2020.
3. From his chapter called ‘The Hind Tit’ in I’ll Take My Stand: The South and the Agrarian Tradition.
