When I was a child, I often played on our large front porch. My dad could sit in his chair in the living room and see me the whole time I played, so my parents considered it safer than playing in the back yard (not that I never played in the back yard, just also a lot on the front porch). Our front porch was huge. At least it seemed so to me. I could even play in the rain, because the roof usually kept me quite dry. Only the coldest weather or severest spring storms kept me inside.
I played with a jack ball for hours, bouncing it against the wall in different ways. (I learned that if you bounce a ball at an angle so it hits the ground first and then the wall, it will continue bouncing in a forward/backward skipping pattern that is extraordinarily fascinating to me even today.)
I found that the pieces of rock that had chipped off our stone house and lay on the ground here and there around it were like chalk. I drew all kinds of things on the porch. My friends and I played tic-tac-toe with bits of chalky rock. I made hop-scotch patterns on the sidewalk with them. When I got a little older, I had the brilliant idea to bring my colored chalks outside and draw with them in colors. But I still liked the rocks best for white. They made a fuller, more complete line.
I learned to jump off the porch, and eventually to jump off the porch and over the 3.5 foot rose bushes. That took a little courage. But I never landed in the thorns. I slid down the railing of the stairs and climbed the decorative corner posts. Mom complained about the black streaks on my clothes from the sliding, the neighbor told me I would fall off and "bust my head open," and Daddy finally put an end to the climbing after he noticed I was bending the "curlicues" from climbing them too often.
I found that a round Quaker Oats box was a blast to throw onto the roof of the porch and try to catch when it rolled off (whole new meaning to "rolled oats").
My appreciation of Oklahoma sunsets began on that front porch in brilliant shades of pink and orange in a mackerel sky.
My children never play on our front porch. It is far too small. The front of our house is mainly defined by a garage door, and the main part of the house is set towards the back so that I couldn't very easily keep an eye on them anyway. Only the kitchen has a view of the porch (if you don't count the bathrooms). The roof is pretty effective at keeping it dry, but the fact that the porch is boxed in on three sides by the house makes it feel cramped, and it tends to be quite cool and damp except in the hottest part of the summer.
My children don't know what jacks are. I hope to change this when they get a little older, but I find that most kids today have never heard of jacks. They have no idea what to do with them.
Our house is brick, so there are no chalk rocks for my kids to play with. Instead, they have professionally designed and marketed "Sidewalk Chalk."
The girls jump off our porch regularly, all the way down the one step to the sidewalk. By the time they get to the age I was when I jumped over the rose bushes, they will have entirely given up the jumping as totally without challenge. And if they dare to try to jump over the hydrangeas without the aid of a high porch to give them a little help...well let's just say Mommy had better not catch them trying it!
Our porch has no decorative pillars or railings, although the little brick wall that runs out from it may offer some creative ideas. An oats box thrown on the roof would get stuck in the guttering on its way down.
The main use I've found so far for our porch is to store tricycles. Even if we wanted to sit on our porch to chat with neighbors and say hi to walkers, we couldn't because it's so set back we wouldn't be able to see or hear any of them. Sunsets and sunrises are both out of the question because of the walls around the porch.
While I don't think my children will be scarred for life because of no more front porches, I do wonder what they'll miss. I wonder what we'll all miss.
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