Summer Evenings and Grandma’s Front Porch Swing

Just a Thought

I hadn’t thought about it in quite a while, but last weekend during the sermon at church, the minister said something that brought those memories back. He was talking about living during the time before air conditioning was commonly in homes. How after cooking the evening meal, and heating up the kitchen (and often the entire house), people would spend the time after supper sitting on the front porch. The reasons for sitting on the porch may have been varied, but enjoying the cool evening breeze and visiting with one another were usually at the top of the list.

While I had air conditioning in the home I grew up in, my grandparents’ home did not. They lived in northern Oklahoma, so it wasn’t nearly as hot as it was in this part of Texas. But that’s not the reason they did not have air conditioning. You see, they had lived through the Depression. The house they lived in was the same one that my mother was born in (literally in the front bedroom.) It started out as a three-room wooden frame house with only one bedroom, a living room and a kitchen. Early on, they planted a tree in the front yard for shade. There was no indoor plumbing at all. They “made do” because that’s just the way things were. By the time I was born, they had added an additional bedroom, a kitchen with running water and a bathroom with a tub and toilet. All luxuries they did not have when my mom was growing up and most of which they still thought they could do without.

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