Daydreams Are What Shape Your Reality

Hold onto them and watch your life become everything you’ve imagined

The house I grew up in didn’t have a large front porch with white wooden steps and ferns swaying in the summer breezes. It had a stoop.

Even the word ‘stoop’ sounds like a letdown, and I was disappointed that we didn't have a stately front porch like the type that graced older homes in older neighborhoods. The kind of porch that would have allowed me to sit out in the rain, read a book in the shade, or take a nap while the air caressed my skin.

Our post-war stoop — aka modern-ranch-in-new-suburbia-front-porch — was a cement pad — about 3'x5' with two cement steps that led down to a short walkway and from there to a cement driveway.

Every day the postman walked up the drive, turned left to the small walkway that led past the overgrown hedges with red berries, up the two steps with potted red geraniums, to the stoop and deposited the mail in the chute that went into the living room. Other than that once-a-day visit from USPS, what good was a 3x5 foot cement stoop?

Why didn’t we have a covered porch with rocking chairs and gliders and a tin roof that made music when the rains came? There is not much a seven-year-old can do about the house she grows up in, but she does have the gift of improvisation.

Our stoop was covered about a foot from a small overhang on the house. Some houses on our street had awnings so at least you could get full coverage from the sun or rain if you sat on the stoop. But ours sat exposed and naked. That stoop taunted me with a scant measure of shelter if I stood plastered against the front door like a skinny statue.

I was a determined child, so I made a porch. Using the old-fashioned umbrellas that were held firm by long handles that ended in a J, I created a fort of sorts. You know the kind of umbrellas that opened up wide and created a bubble of protection around you? The Mary Poppins type of umbrellas?

I walked to school every day (uphill one way). This required an assortment of umbrellas for the frequent rainy days in northeast Ohio. My umbrellas were colorful, varied in shape, and decorated with flowers, polka dots, and stripes.

I propped open my umbrellas around the edge of the stoop and sat flush against the aluminum screen door (under the 12" overhang) and created my dream porch. I can only imagine what this tent of umbrellas must have looked like from the street!

“What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.” — Mary Jo Putney

If the rain was gentle and fell straight, I could pretend I was under the shelter of my fantasy porch. I read books, played jacks, colored, and created chalk masterpieces on the stoop’s smooth cement surface.

Strong winds or slanted rain ruined my makeshift porch and drove me inside. But the Midwest often brought gentle showers that supported my fantasy world.

I live in central Texas now and seldom do we get any type of shower that comes close to “gentle.” Everything is bigger in Texas and that saying is never truer than when it comes to the weather.

Rain in Texas comes in two forms: hard and harder. Deluges accompanied by strong winds that roll across the flat landscape result in drenched porches and little choice but to shelter inside.

Yesterday, a gentle rain, sans wind, visited our small farm. To the north and south, I could see blue skies and sunshine so I knew this was a short visit reserved for the few at the end of a hot, dry, rainless summer.

I ran outside to my covered porch with the metal roof and jumped on my porch swing. I inhaled that special summer afternoon rain-meets-hot-air concoction that has something to do with ions and dust in the air.

I didn't need my umbrella shelter, I was all grown up with a farmhouse and covered porch to call my own, but I smiled and reveled in this short-lived moment, feeling like a kid on a stoop daydreaming about a porch of my own someday.

“What one loves in childhood stays in the heart forever.” — Mary Jo Putney