I planned and built a screened porch on my house. I grew up in a house with a screened porch. It was so important to my mom that our house had a fireplace and a screened porch.
Grandma Isabel (Grandma Is) took care of me after school and during the summers.
During the school year, I would walk to her house from Washington Elementary just two blocks away. I would rest against the cream naugahyde ottoman and watch Room 222, Gilligan’s Island, and MASH.
But in the summer, it was different. Grandma said with a sneer on her lips, “There are only re-runs on in the summer”. She declared this as if reruns were a national tragedy that we must avoid at all costs.
So, we would spend the long summer days on her screened porch. It consisted of a central dining table with four comfy chairs and a few lawn chairs around the edges. One of the chairs was “her chair” and also had a smaller side table next to it. tv tray table. crossword puzzles and reader’s digest
Whenever she sat down, she plopped. She drank hot coffee and stated that it was perfect to drink hot coffee in the summer–I don’t remember exactly why…
She loved to read the daily and weekend papers. I enjoyed the colored comics.
We spent long hours playing a dice game called ZILCH. She also taught me how to play a type of rummy game called 500. But she always got mad at me when I broke up the straights on the table to make bunches of the same cards. My thought was, “I need to do what I need to do.”
A screened porch allows someone in the Midwest to enjoy the outdoors without being baked by the sun or eaten alive by the mosquitos. The breeze in the early spring carried the scent of lilacs and was shaded by a mature Norway Maple.
As I write this, I can hear the wine of Cicadas and neighbors mowing their grass just down the block.
As I think back to those lazy summer days on Grandma Is’s screened porch, I can’t help but laugh at the simplicity and quirks of it all—like her belief that hot coffee was a summer essential and her dramatic aversion to TV reruns.
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