HUMOR

I’m Sitting on My Porch Because the New Yorker Told Me To

Stupid magazine.

Photo by Boston Public Library on Unsplash

I’m sitting on my porch.

It’s about a million degrees outside and even the dog, who worships the sun and will lie in the grass until physically picked up like a sack of furry potatoes and returned indoors, has said “Fuck this” and is standing there pointed at the door, which is how she communicates.

The only way I ever knows she needs or wants anything is because she points her body at it, like a compass needle. Poor Hershey — heart of gold, brain the size of a chickpea.

I’m sitting on my porch, which I never do, because The New Yorker published this article about how great porches are and what a shame it is that nobody sits on their porch anymore.

There’s even a bit about some crunchy private school in Vermont or someplace equally tie-dyed where the kids sleep outside year round, even in the winter, and one former student says she still sleeps with a window open all year long.

This sounds like child abuse to me, but what do I know.

Porches, the article moans lugubriously, “are semi-magical spaces, intermediate between inside and outside.”

They embody “the benefits of public life, the thrills of nature, the atmosphere of weather, the exhilaration of coming and going, the calm of simply sitting down, the warmth of family and friends, and the restfulness of solitude.” The Porch, Charlie Hailey, 2021.

Like all things nostalgic, this paints a sheen of golden light on something that was an uncomfortable necessity (I’m reminded of the current craze for raw milk). Everybody lived on their porch because nobody had the air conditioning or even sometimes the physical room to make the inside of their home livable.

There was also this little thing call tuberculosis. As with all air-borne illness, the answer was to get outside, away from other people.

The problem with porches is identical to their supposed benefit. They’re outside.

You know what else is outside? Bugs. Half of the article is a description of the many and varied ways to protect…