You are about to read the first-ever “Back Porch” that’s actually about a back porch.
And if that weren’t exciting enough, it’s about my back porch, which is one of the feeblest and saddest structures on the face of the earth.
Maybe you know where I’m coming from. When renovating a house, the interior comes first. You may not be able to catch some rays while reclining on a deck chair or fire up a Hibachi in your bathroom, but that space is pretty high up on the human-necessity-chain. The second big priority is the exterior of the house—the siding, the windows, the roof. If at that point you run out of money, or if the energy you’ve put into either doing the work yourself or enduring the presence of strange, sweaty people with tool belts in your house, has sapped you of the will to live, outside spaces such as your back porch take a back seat. You don’t really need it. You can just forget it.
Except that it’s always there, like the rotting deck of a long-retired whaling ship, reminding you that your new day hasn’t quite yet dawned.
Simile and metaphor—I need them to describe the…thing…that lurks just outside my back door. No, not a thing. A creature. An indoor cat or dog crying to come in. But no fur. Skin sunburnt and peeling. Buckets of old rain and sheets of old sleet and snow in its pores. Bones coming undone, and not with a creak, but a shriek.
I remember all too well the moment the guy who was working on my siding nodded toward the porch and said, “You’re going to have to do something about that, my friend.” He wasn’t my friend, but he was right. “After everything else is done,” I said, a lie so transparent that he couldn’t help but chuckle kindly. I wanted to explain to him that I was a shepherd who had only one lost sheep on my hands—only one, that’s all. But of course I couldn’t.
I’m a bit saner now. I feel I can think more clearly. Here’s what I could do: tear the whole thing down. That would be doing “something about that,” right? And yet I can’t bring myself to wrap my hands around the handle of a sledgehammer and let ‘er rip, and haul away the rubble and create a blank hole in the fabric of my real estate venture. Maybe I’m mentally—if not financially—ready to transform the decrepit sheep and welcome it into the comely flock. To do the right thing. To do good.