Porch Skating posted 7/4/2008 10:53:38 PM | 3 kudos what's this?     report abuse

sloriver

The old house at Sand Springs is still standing. It’s called Sand Springs because there’s a massive spring in the hillside that, for many years, provided the drinking water for the town of Blue Mountain. The house was rented by my maternal grandparents. It’s the house where Grandma Thompson died. It was built in the plantation style. Not antebellum with the tall columns in front, the low ranch style with a porch that ran all the way around the house. This veranda was a shade that kept the hot sun out of the windows and captured a breeze and gave shade at any time of the day. You might have to move from one side to the other to find the shade but it was there. This porch was great for playing tag, if you were one of the faster kids. As one of the smaller ones, I remember running around that damned porch trying to catch those older kids and failing. Almost giving up, I’d be taunted by several heads sticking around a corner singsonging “you can’t catch us”.

It was a good place to ride a tricycle too. You could ride all day and never reach the end of that porch. A panorama of pine trees and mimosas in bloom unfolded as you rounded each corner. The huge old oak spread its branches over a packed dirt yard, beaten bare by countless children in bare feet. The tire swing hung from that old oak. It sloshed after a rain and bred mosquitoes all summer. The family met on that porch, eating watermelon and fresh peaches in season. Lou Della’s (my grandmother) coconut cake found its way out to the porch and crumbs dropped. Children ate candy and tracked the dirt from the yard onto the porch. The porch floor got dirty and sticky. Cleaning time was the best time of all.

Every child available ran for the porch when it was time to clean. Lou Della would sprinkle Cheer detergent over the floor boards and call for water. Buckets of water came from the faucet and were sprinkled and poured over the detergent. Then the fun began. Barefooted kids grabbed brooms and mops and sloshed happily back and forth until the smoothly worn boards were wet and slippery with soap. You can’t ice skate in Mississippi but that porch was the next best thing. Kids slid and skated, romped and dove belly first down the length of the porch. There were no railings around the edges so a good slide might end in an airborne landing in the packed dirt yard. Happy squeals came from the children as the play continued until the soap started to dry up. More water would be added and the sliding began again.

All good things must come to an end and our porch skating did too. After a while adding water wouldn’t work up a lather any longer and the boards lost their slipperiness. A few halfhearted slides by the most stubborn of us finally convinced us it was over. The only thing left was a thorough rinse. You have to pay the piper if you’re going to dance and pay we must. The cost of the fun was to finish the job. It took many buckets of water poured down the porch to rinse it to Lou Della’s satisfaction and then it was off limits to dirty feet for a few sparkling clean hours. As we grew older we realized we could drop things on the porch to deliberately move up the cleaning schedule but as this knowledge came to us, so did we become jaded. The porch lost its magic when you grew a little older and after all we realized that the porch was for the younguns. We older kids made way so the magic of Lou Della’s porch could work itself on the next crop of children.

The old house is dilapidated now. It’s once impressive exterior has given way to cracked boards and rusted roof tin. It’s changed greatly in fifty years but it’s stayed the same also. The old oak tree has a new tire swing. It’s a radial. Last year I pulled off the road and sat on the shoulder looking at that veranda that seems so small now. It was once endless. The people living there are poor and I wonder if we were poor back then too. I suspect we were. I watched for a while and then a handsome black woman walked out and sat in the porch swing. I three year old on a tricycle followed after. I smiled and waved as I pulled back on the road.

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