My daughter and her boyfriend put the bowl of peas on the kitchen table and started pulling out chairs.
“Not there,” I said. “Shell the peas on the front porch.”
They picked up the bowl of peas and another empty bowl. Together, they sat on the porch swing and rocked gently back and forth as they shelled peas, the little green balls in one bowl, the pods in another.
In this life of cell phones, apps, social media, anime, electric guitars at church and all the like, they had a step back into peace.
They had that moment – themselves, the swing, the gentle breeze, the bowls of peas.
My sister recounts a time when she was in elementary school and the assignment was to write an essay on a special moment. The next day, she sort of got in trouble with the teacher for not writing the appropriate kind of essay.
Children had written about going to Disney World, about exciting new toys for Christmas, about going to the zoo.
My sister wrote about sitting on the porch swing with Mom, leisurely eating green peas straight from the bowl.
That was the same porch swing that my best friend and I were courted on.
We took turns, of course. The porch swing reigned supreme in a life we otherwise bemoaned as too boring, as too small-townish with nothing to do. Oh now that there is too much to do, how I long for those days.
In this gracious old Southern house we had a wraparound porch, perfect for two giggly teenage girls and two knobby-kneed, floppy eared, pimpled teenage boys. The traditional long, wide swing was at one end of the porch. Way on across the front of the house and turning the corner to the side were some individual chairs and a table at the other end of the porch. That gave us each a private spot for courting and also a central meeting place, the neutral territory of the living room which had a door to each side of the porch.
We were 15 with a major crisis: Kim was only a month away from her 16th birthday, and she had not yet been kissed.
We fretted and worried nonstop. My boyfriend, Chris, did plenty of sloppy kissing (yuck, but, at least he was good looking, charming and quick-witted) as we sat on the porch swing, safely away from my mother who was rooms away in the kitchen. He only recently had begun bringing his own best friend, James, with him on those Saturday visits. James and Kim took the side porch around the columned corner.
But nothing happened. They both were shy.
As we faced the ominous deadline – “Sweet 16 and never been kissed” – we despaired.
Then, one Saturday, two weeks before that terrible deadline, we were both on our respective private (or so we liked to think) corners of the porch when I heard a knock on the inside of the living room door.
I left Chris on the porch swing, opened the door and went into the living room. Kim grabbed me by my arms, scurried me across the room and quietly but enthusiastically squealed, “He kissed me! He kissed me!”
We hugged each other and hopped around. Whew – just in the nick of time! With only 2 weeks to go before she turned 16!
Then we broke apart and went to our respective boys in our respective corners of the porch.
There had been a few times Chris had said that if one of my parents would pick him up, he’d come over for a visit. My mother said of course not – boys only value what they have to extend effort for. If she picked him up, it would make me look desperate, and he would not appreciate me.
Oh, how terribly unfair she was, and how it was her fault that I would miss out on a boyfriend.
Of course, I did not miss out. Not only did he find a way, but he found a way for James, too.
One day when we were in our thirties, Chris told me that once he got a car measured the distance between my house and his.
“Dang, girl!” he said, laughing and shaking his head. “It was 3.1 miles I either rode on my little brother’s child bike to come see you, or I walked it with James – and then another 3.1 miles back home! I’ve never gone through so much effort for anyone else.”
Hmmm – my mother was right.
And so I was right, when I sent my daughter out to the porch swing to shell peas. (Of course, I clambered around noisily in the living room at the other side of the window from them, to make sure their focus was on shelling those peas.)
The special moments of life happen on the porch swing.
