The Porch

“Come sit a spell.” These old words lapsed into disuse for the decades of manufacturing and “jobs in town,” the decades after the farm. But now, thankfully, porches are reappearing on houses and the invitation to share them is back in our vocabulary.

When Bill and I first built our colonial house in the early 60’s, the “porch” was basically a façade barely wide enough to accommodate the pillars and a lawn chair. Our children grew up tumbling down our hillside and fishing in “Gaither’s Pond,” but there wasn’t much porch-sitting going on.

Just before we learned our first grandchild was on the way, however, Bill and I said to each other one day, “Why don’t we build a real porch, upstairs and down?” So we called a builder to explore the possibility of moving the pillars out about 12 or 15 feet, turning two of the upstairs windows into doors, and making porches accessible to both downstairs living and upstairs guest bedrooms.

Now the porch is like a special summer room, with lots of rocking chairs and conversations. People who used to hurry by afraid they were “putting us out” when we invited them inside, quickly accept an invitation to have a lemonade on the porch. At night when the grandchildren are in their pajamas, we make tea and take snacks upstairs on the porch which feels like a treehouse. We listen to the frogs and cicadas and watch garden spiders crocheting lace between the white porch rails.

I take my journal and coffee to the porch very early in the morning to talk to God and hear the world coming to life for a new day. When the kids who have spent the night awaken, we eat scrambled eggs and fruit at the little glass table and talk each other’s legs off while the tulips, geraniums and impatiens watch us from the garden that edges the porch steps and the black squirrels chase each other through the limbs of the maples and oak trees in the yard.

Oh! The joy of porches! No house should be without them. If the world is alienated and people are lonely, maybe porches can be the catalyst for bringing us together again.

Come. Sit a spell!

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Love Song To My Life

Welcome!

At the urging of a close friend, I have decided to write a blog. Now, this is funny, because all my life as a writer I have written short observations of life. I wrote short pieces because for more than 20 years I was traveling every weekend with my husband as part of the Bill Gaither Trio while having and rearing three children very close in age, writing lyrics for the songs Bill and I wrote together, and entertaining a constant stream of friends and guests and, eventually, teen-agers and college students that came through our house.  All this while trying to help run a publishing company, pull weeds in the gardens, teach a college class in Songwriting, keep up the laundry, run kids to a variety of activities and lessons, and keep romance alive in all the ways I could think of—romance with my husband and romance with my life.

I would periodically complain to God asking, “When am I ever going to get to write a real book?" Truth is, I could hardly get alone time in the bathroom, let alone to Hawaii for two months at a time (like male authors I knew did) to write their latest book while their wives waited on them hand and foot.

The other day I had an epiphany! I’ve been writing a blog before there were blogs and before ADHD was a national epidemic. So I guess I’ll just keep writing what I see and what life is teaching me in short snippets. I hope you will tell me what you see and learn too.

Most of all, I hope we all get better at noticing the beauty in the common things and the miracles we trip over all around us every day, 

For we have this moment to hold in our hands
And to touch as it slips through our fingers like sand;
Yesterday’s gone, and tomorrow may never come,
But we have this moment...today.

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