Porch Time

We bought a couple of Adirondack chairs for our deck today. I use the term "deck" loosely-- it's really much more of a balcony, but the architects that designed the place labeled it a deck, and what can I say? That grandiosity has legs. We used to have a table and chairs, and while it was nice to eat out there a few evenings a year, there really wasn't enough room for anything else, and so our limited outdoor space went mostly unused. We decided to give the table and chairs away, and since then, the deck has been like a blank canvas just waiting for the right vision. Today we found it. Every summer, we take my nephews to Maine for a week. The place we rent is an old fisherman's house right on Eastern Bay across from Mount Desert Island. It has a porch that wraps around three sides in the back. There must be eight Adirondack chairs all lined up looking out over that half-acre lawn down to the mussel beach, across the bay, and right up to Sargent Mountain, the second highest peak in Acadia National Park. I have the same view from the bed I sleep in each year, and I can't help thinking that it wouldn't be a bad place to draw your last breath, provided that the windows were open, and the morning marine mist had burnt off, and the sun, or at least the moon, was shining on the mountain across the way. Every day when we're there we have porch time. In the beginning it was Aunt Tracey declaring forced togetherness: join me on the porch boys; you won't regret it, but if you do, please keep it to yourself. For less than an hour we would all sit on those chairs and read, or draw, or play guitar, or write, or, okay, Josh was allowed to pound wiffle balls into the yard, but that was his way of communing with himself and the place and the rest of us, which was all I wanted, and what made the whole trip worth it. It wasn't long, though, before I'd take my notebook and some coffee out there and through the screen I'd hear one of the boys ask another, "Is it porch time?" and the Adirondack chairs would fill. Back home, I missed porch time, and last year the end of vacation coincided with my desire to re-introduce a common "circle time" at the beginning of most classes to my sixth graders. Nancie Atwell famously has a rocking chair, and I wanted something like that in my classroom, too, so when I walked into World Market and saw their Adirondack chairs on clearance, I knew what I should do. We don't call it porch time in my class, but it's as close as I can manage inside four walls, miles from any ocean or mountain. It's a time and place to share our reading, writing, and thoughts, and I think it goes a long way toward building community with my students, and to be honest, there are times when the view from that chair is just as breath-taking or more so than the one from that porch in Maine.