My porch or yours???

By Lonnie Cruse

When I'm away from home and need a stress-free place to go, at least in my mind, I visit a porch solidly built in the twenties or thirties or maybe even the forties. A porch where people once sat and rocked and watched the occasional car passing by, stirring up the dust covering the road that runs just beyond the iron gate. A porch where bees buzz drowesly from bloom to bloom on the climbing rosebush carefully tied to a nearby post. A porch where birds flit back and forth from the ground to a nest crammed into the eaves, carefully building it even higher or stuffing fat worms into tiny beaks.

The woman seated there waves the cardboard fan, given her at the last funeral she attended, back and forth in front of her tired face, to ward off the summer's heat and flies. The man mops his brow with a red kerchief and comments on this year's crop. His overalls need washing after long hours in the nearby fields.

I'm seated in the swing, unseen but listening in. Unseen because the man and woman are long gone and the porch sits abandoned, still attached to the old house, also abandoned, having outlived the family and its usefullness. And I'm only here in my imagination.

One of these days I'll get out of my car and go sit on one of those porches for real, tresspassing if need be. I love looking at old houses, imagining the people who once lived there.

Nearly every house has some sort of porch, or stoop, if you will. Be it a small square of concrete, just large enough to stand on while unlocking the door. If the owner is lucky, there is an overhang or awning above to keep off the rain while you fumble for your keys. Then there are porches with awnings or covers that are large enough to sit under and enjoy the view, or feed the dog and stay dry during a rain shower, or to water the plants from. And who can deny the beauties of a screened-in porch, fending off the attacks of the various summer insects who live only to irritate?

If you haven't figured it out by now, I'm a porch person. In nearly forty-five years of marriage, the very best gift hubby has ever given me is a sun porch. When I'm at home, I practically live there. But let me back up. When we moved to our current home eleven years ago, he had two concrete porches poured, one for the front door, one for the back, each supported underneath by brick, with three steps leading up, but no cover to protect us from the elements. There are no trees nearby, so sitting on the porches meant sitting in the hot sun, or the brisk wind, or the rain, assuming I was that hardy. I love watching it rain, having grown up in the desert, but I'm not quite that hardy.

We were planning our fortieth anniversary celebration a few years ago and decided to use what we'd saved for a trip to buy lumber for a porch instead. And windows. And dry wall. And paint. And . . . you get the picture. Hubby built most of it all by himself in nearly a year. (Yes, I helped when I could, but I'm not much of a carpenter.) Now that lovely porch sports fourteen windows and a door and a futon to sit on and watch the rain or take a nap and a dining table to feed family and friends and watch the birds and squirrels eating with us. Or the occasional deer who meanders by. And there is his tomato plot just beyond the porch to keep an eye on. And mine. I'm ahead of him so far this season, but tomatoes are fickle, so who knows which of us will harvest first?

There is a point in here somewhere. Ah, yes, there it is. Back in the day--as a friend of mine says--before air conditioning and television took over our homes and our lives, people sat on porches and fanned and watched the world pass by. I wonder how much we all miss out on now, sitting inside where it's admittedly cooler, watching a fictional world pass by.

May I invite you to join me by going outside on your porch, whatever size it is, or perhaps out in the yard, and look at life out there? Listen to the birds or the insects or the rain? De-stress? I'll be drinking a cup of cinnamon tea. Probably be wearing my favorite robe. If you'd like to join me in a toast, I'm in the mid-west, so point your cup that'a way. We should probably have some cake too, don't you think?

I wish you a lovely summer of birds and trees and breezes and rain and memories with your family. And time on a porch. Mine or yours?

Technology . . . ain't it grand?

By Lonnie Cruse

Sigh.

That Ronzoni pasta advertisement on television reminds me of my childhood. Not because of the pasta but because of Ronzoni's, the huge department store that was once and long ago located in downtown Las Vegas, Nevada, waaay back in the fifties. One of my favorite dresses of all time came from there. Pink and grey striped (or was it checked?) HUGE puff sleeves, tight waist, full skirt. Those were the days. Rarely find a department or dress store in ANY downtown area in this decade. It's all about the malls. Which somehow brings me to technology. Okay, hang onto my shirt tail and you won't get lost. Really.

Since the time of the aforementioned dress, I've seen a lot of amazing changes in the world. Computers that were the size of a room now fit on our laps. People chat on phones while shopping at stores that sell everything from lettuce to lamps, with Leggos located on aisle five. Have a directional problem (which Sandy Parshall and I seem to share) get a GPS system. And I do adore my Tom Tom. My friend, Ann, got another brand and I must tell you hers is downright rude if you miss a designated turn. Mine scratches its little electronic head and reroutes me. So there.

High deffinition television puts us right on the mountain top with the elk or mountain goats or deep in the desert with the meerkats. It's almost like being there in person. Machines wash not only our clothes but our dishes as well, and small ovens now heat our supper in seconds. Palm devices (and cell phones and other like units) keep our address books, calendars (reminding us to be where and when) and some even hold books for us to read, right there on the little screen. MP3s or iPods let us take tons of pictures and music everywhere we go, or even better, books on tape. (I love being able to download practically any book I want off Net Library and listen to it on my MP3.) We are truly in an electronic age and I shudder to think of what would happen if all the batteries in the world suddenly disappeared. And by the way, does anybody know if that irritating little pink bunny is still going and going, banging on that noisy drum?

Is there a point here? I sure hope so. Many of the items I've listed above were not available to the general public when I was growing up, or even as a very young newlywed. And we've all come to enjoy and depend on them. Trust me, anybody who tries to take my Tom Tom is dead. Totally. But I have to wonder what the next fifty to seventy-five years will bring in the way of amazing inventions for my grandchildren to use and depend on. Every now and then I see a television program about someone who has moved to a very remote spot like the volcano some guy lives on/near in Hawaii (all his neighbors have left, he checks the lava level every day, and he could die there if it suddenly decides to belch) or the back woods of Montana, the middle of the Nevada desert, etc. These folks choose to live alone, with no neighbors, no modern conveniences, and they survive. And they seem happy. Don't think I could do it. Yet I do worry that we are overly dependant on electronics.

As for hubby and me, yeah, we have most of the modern conveniences. We also have coal oil lamps and a fireplace for those times when the power goes out and we are stuck out here in the country with modern-day conveniences that suddenly don't work. But as a writer, I'd be hard put to survive without my laptop, Internet access, Alphasmart, cell phone, etc. They keep me going and keep me on time. I have a very old typewriter that belonged to a friend sitting on top of my bookshelf in my office. I enjoy glancing at it from time to time, remembering how I first learned to type. I have no desire to get any closer to it than that.

So how have all these electronic helps actually helped you? And can you imagine doing whatever you do without them? I'm afraid they've pretty much spoiled me.

Sigh.