SEASONS

Is This Space Taken?

The upside of bringing the inside outside

Cleo the Cat and I completely agree.

The great outdoors is the place to be, whether the temps are hovering at a cool 40 degrees or “hell’s front porch” has descended on the house during an insufferable August.

We’ve got blankets to bundle up in; a lazy ceiling fan and an often constant breeze to keep us chill enough.

I thank my Daddy for my desire to hang with Mother Nature.

He was a whirlwind when it came to two things: Devouring The New York Times on a lazy Sunday afternoon, and attacking overgrown areas near his garden.

The man was a human weed-whacker. And as vehement.

We’d hang out on Pops’ fieldstone patio — he journeyed to the stonemason outside town and lugged back hundred-pound slabs and hefty bags of sand to carefully craft his outdoor space — three of us, at least, lounging on the cute Williamsburg benches he’d assembled to finish the project. But Daddy hopped up every five minutes to grab hold of hunks of chickweed, dandelions and crabgrass breaching the boundaries of his sweet outdoor haven.

As Dad yanked the invaders from between sandy cracks, Mama would complain about his delight in destruction.

“Really, Frank, sit down,” she’d cajole. “Some of those have flowers. They’ve got just as much a right to be here as we do.”

I don’t think Daddy concurred.

Wherever we lived, my folks took outdoor living to the max. Not hiking or biking, but they favored cocktails al fresco.

When we moved and left the first patio behind, Mom and Dad leveled an area right outside the back door of the new place and this time hauled brick pavers to the backyard.

Relaxation was the goal, no matter the time of year.

Daddy bought some new (to us) patio furniture at a church rummage sale, including matching chaise lounges — they sounded elegant but were made of funky plastic that had to be scrubbed a lot — and an outside table with four coated steel chairs. You know, the bouncy kind, popular in the ’60s, with the cute clamshell backs.

Mama was thrilled. Our new patio was more spacious, and we had gobs of room to hang out in every season, for any reason. My sister and I were the only kids around who ate afternoon snacks lounging in a backyard full of potted plants and peonies.

The two Williamsburg benches found a new home, too. They looked downright faux-Colonial near the sidewalk leading from the driveway to the front door.

After I was grown and had my chance to make my mark on the great outdoors, I took full advantage. We moved to D.C., and I left a lot of the boxes unpacked. I was more interested in getting started on my own sweet space, located in the minuscule (seriously, about 20 x 40, or 800 square feet, or 0.0184 of an acre) backyard.

Our Capitol Hill patio became a fenced-in shelter from city struggles. Even our kids preferred to eat outside — no matter the prevailing winds or chances of precipitation.

I spent so much time out back at our Victorian row house that I began to think of that open-air gathering place as an extra room. I wasn’t comfortable unless a stiff breeze caught the newspaper and wafted it toward the neighbor’s side of the fence.

And then, of course, I’d jump up to retrieve the wayward newsprint, upending the clunky metal table in my efforts more than once while dumping over a scalding cup of tea. Two things you need to know: I’m not much of a coffee drinker, and once I earned a large, perhaps second-degree burn, complete with a reddish-yellowish blister, on my knee after such backyard shenanigans.

“The pain will leave,” martial arts great Bruce Lee once said, “once it has finished teaching you.” Not sure that’s entirely correct, but I did learn something that day…

Use a random brick to hold down the sections of the paper you’re not reading. Or, go digital.

We later moved to the burbs and had to recreate our outdoor retreat. We worked toward that super-gradually, but about 10 years in I’d achieved optimum back-to-nature nirvana.

You may have heard this before, but the D.C. area is not exactly a bargain-basement paradise.

We got around that by investing in a bank-owned bargain. It was a sad tale, but a thrifty sale. The house had been on the market for three years but was vacant for five or six.

Trust me when I say that more critters than people—of the rodent, insect and other varieties, including foxes and bunnies — inhabited both the inside and the outside environs of this particular property.

That included the confines of the screened-in porch out back, which looked like a recent host to a racoon rave.

Following Daddy’s game plan, we went to work. Put in new screens. Painted, and made a valiant effort to prop up the outside. Collected odds and ends at flea markets and bargain dens — a couple of chairs here, an old-school floor lamp there. Acquired some old rag rugs and then “decorated” the rustic enclosure with beach finds and plants I’d nurtured over the years.

I started saving spare change — cause I knew that if I was ever gonna move my beat-up, baby-poop brown IKEA couch out back, I’d have to have some windows to shelter it from any storm.

I spent hours on that rickety excuse for a refuge, swilling hot tea, reading the newspaper and daydreaming while scratching through student papers. We also moved a picnic table out there and hosted tons of family dinners.

After a decade, it looked like we’d convinced the previous inhabitants of a more feral nature we were there to stay.

We planted the flag of true ownership the day I hired a guy to install windows and a decent floor out on our slapped-together get-away. He’d been wanting to expand his contracting curriculum vitae, so we struck a pretty sweet deal. He’d spiff up our porch a tad, and wouldn’t bleed us dry.

No, we couldn’t swing installing French doors, so the unattractive sliding glass apparatus remained. Our bank account couldn’t handle year-round HVAC, so we put in a small baseboard to keep the plants alive, and me warm, in winter’s chillier months.

We couldn’t countenance investing in new siding for the outside, nor something along the bottom of the trim to keep critters out, so we continued to host the occasional raccoon or stray cat underneath our renovated space.

But we kept the windows open on the regular. It really felt like home out there.

And now we’ve moved again. I knew I had landed on terra firma when I saw the screened-in porch in a backyard forest of oak and hickory trees.

The “crippy-crappy”, as my family calls my back porch collection, from my past iteration of heaven fits perfectly in our new outdoor hideaway. We had a battle with spring pollen, but once it blew through we moved on. And my IKEA couch stays dry underneath the overhang on the far end of the space that’s more and more of a haven every day.

The scents of summer settle over the neighborhood. The hum of leaf blowers drones on down the street. A family of black squirrels skitters among the trees. Our multitude of feathered friends (someday I’ll take a gander at Daddy’s copy of The Birds of North America) compete in low-key chitters.

The new deer family (mama and her triplets) stops by at least once a day, feasting on azaleas and a green bush that looks more like a weed than something worth watering.

Cleo and I are complete. And that’s the most important thing.

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