Porch Season
I’m writing this from our back porch, and I’ll keep writing from here for at least the next couple of weeks. Then, it’ll get cold(ish), and I’ll bundle up and keep writing from my back porch. It takes a lot to drive me back inside. The old saw about Tallahassee is that it’s eight months of heaven and four months of hell. We’re in the “heaven” months.
I bought this place in 2004 mainly because of the porch. I’m not even kidding. When I came down the road to see this place, I walked through the garage and on to this porch and…I just knew.
It’s 62 feet long and 12 feet wide and overlooks the pool, the pond, the island, and the meadow. The pond has now been partially cleared of invasives, and the birds are very much back. A dozen ducks in the water every morning, heron, ibis, limpkins, et al.
The owls are delighted and, at the moment, boisterous and loud. The red-shoulder hawks are enjoying themselves, gorging on eels. The otters have gone mad with the snails, leaving their cracked shells everywhere. Jilly brought a big shiner into the house for snacks yesterday. Renee was…not pleased.
I work at a picnic table I built by hand. It’s so large and heavy it will never leave this place. It seats 12 comfortably, even with my laptop, coffee cups, Diet Coke cans, books, and articles on one end. They may or may not survive the next strong wind, but this table is here until the Sun cools.
We’re almost into the season where our friends sit around this table, talk loudly, eat good food, and stay until the wee hours. It’s a good season and one of my favorite places. In a year or two of sweeping changes, this place has a certain magic to it that we genuinely treasure.
Every writer needs a place they work best. This is mine.
What’s yours?
At my house in San Diego, it’s my office, at my laptop or outside at my supercool table and chairs which are made out of recycled plastic milk bottles from a great MN company, Even in an earthquake, those tables & chairs don’t move,
In MN, I’ve loved sitting out my parents screened in porch with a vaulted roof, skylight, and ceiling fan. Even in 100 degree weather, it stays comfortable with the breezes and fans. I wrote one of my first emails to Bill Kristol, David Frum, and you in 2018 from that porch.
The best writing was when I hand wrote an episode script I submitted to Alan Alda and Bert Metcalfe from M*A*S*H in 1981. My mother, kicking and screaming, agreed to type the darn thing on her electric typewriter. It had been the standing joke that she would never type anything for me again after my sophomore year in high school. With my cerebral palsy on my left hand, typing on a typewriter was challenging. However, I was such a perfectionist, I was always wanting edits until the end. A 32 page term paper with a 150 footnotes on Henry VIII was her limit.
So, when Bert Metcalfe wrote me back to say that their last season would be a truncated one, and they wouldn’t be able use my script, but that my script was actually quite good…. He gave me the name an agent to use at The William Morris Agency (It doesn’t exist anymore.). My mom told me that she wanted an agent for her typing. Alan Alda wrote a nice response as well. He asked if I was an aspiring writer. (Nope- just a teacher who had contracted mono at the end of my first year with the kids in an overcrowded classroom. I spent much of my summer of 1981 lying on the couch, binging on M*A*S*H reruns). Since that time, I haven’t had that length of “down time” to relax and think about writing.
I was so glad when I got my first Mac. I could do my own typing and editing (1984) Teaching, parenting, being a wife took up so much of my energy-both practical and creative, that the thought of real writing has only been a passing fantasy until the past few years- husband free, child free now, and retired I’ve thought about that fantasy again.
Maybe I’ll write something.,..
Love this post and your intrepid continued defense of our Democracy.