Porches, Painfully Obvious

I have a summer dream, and that dream is porches.

ALI AND DREW, MARRIED, RELAXING ON A PORCH. This is a really good porch, by the way, at a truly lovely hunting-lodge style home in the woods of Georgia, south of Atlanta. Any of the below would be great on this porch. Photo courtesy of Ali's cousin Katie.

The Hairpin is out for the weekend. The Circuit Court and County Building here in Washtenaw County, Michigan, have a four-day Memorial Day weekend thanks to a furlough day. I'm down to one out of four attorneys and no calls lighting up the switchboard, I've got my sunglasses open on my desk and a stomach clamoring for lunch.

It's almost dinnertime. Remember when I had a porch in the canopy of downtown Ann Arbor? Emma and I ate twenty-four pierogi at our first meal on that porch. We had a graduation cocktail party for Emma in the wind and chill of late April. Later, they passed a bottle of Jim Beam Black around in the dark until it disappeared. We had a welcome-home party for Emma after a summer of Yiddish on the East Coast. Meg and I drank a bottle of vinho verde on that porch after I got home from Detroit via Amtrak, two hours late or more. We sweated and sweated and finally escaped the heat at a nearby bar.

So many breakfasts of scrambled eggs and orange juice, while the bumblebees bumbled into the sliding glass doors, bump bump bump. I never knew a bumblebee could be so loud.

A porch, a table and -cloth, the evening sun. Sunglasses, eventually pushed up onto your head. A pitcher of water, glasses. Bread and cheese, burgers, whatever, I'll take it. Just give me some carbs and some fat and a drink, and some smiles.

It was my birthday on the porch, once, on a Thursday evening almost a year ago. Basil gimlets, uh...attempted Singapore Sling? Blood of Christ? Something red.

When the sun sets, candles. I buy so many candles in my attempts at being a girl, and use them so rarely. I don't have a porch this year, not really. Candles don't really work in the wind, also, but that's what lanterns are for!

It's five, goodbye, office, goodbye, internet.

(I have a lot of summer dreams. Beware.)