Our back porch wasn’t quite as fancy as the one in this picture, but it did have a glider, a grass rug in the summer (rolled up for the winter), and was completely screened in; and we loved it.
One of the things I’ve been remembering lately is those summer nights when I was in bed and my mother and father relaxed with friends or family on the back porch. All the windows were open; hardly anyone had home air conditioning back then. So I would lie there in bed and listen: the peaceful rumble of conversation, punctuated occasionally by a laugh, and the soft clink of glass on glass–it was the grownups on the porch, doing what grownups do. I never could quite make out what they were saying: grownup stuff, probably, of no interest to a five-year-old.
But the thing I remember most about it now was that it made me feel safe. And secure. It was the sound of things being as they should be. The adults were as they ought to be. It kept the monsters at bay. The boogie-man wouldn’t come out of the woods as long as grownups were out there on their porches, or in their backyards, upholding peace and sanity.
I kind of miss that feeling.
But there is a higher and even more reliable guardian: Behold, He that keepeth Israel shall neither slumber nor sleep (Psalm 121:4).