I Love Surprises

Hi friends.

Mosquitos love me, do they love you, too? I spend all summer warding them off, hiding from them. At my last house I had a very good screened-in back porch where I liked to have my coffee and sit and read in the morning but also at dusk it was nice because I could just be, calm, happy and bug-free. Any time of day, honestly, it was a great porch.

At this new house I moved into last year, I kept wanting that same back porch to somehow magically exist but it simply does not. And in order to put one in, things would have to be knocked down and built back up again. Crazy expensive and time-consuming, all of it.

In a wild moment I thought: What if I bought one of those screened-in gazebos you can just dump in your yard? Let me, a self-employed creative person who is unclear what my long-haul plan truly is beyond just writing as fast as I can, just pull thousands of dollars out of my pocket. It is funny to think about things you absolutely cannot afford and also kind of don’t need. It’s a good way to pass the time when you don’t want to think about reality. Ha ha, it’s hilarious. (I am not going to buy a screened-in gazebo.)

It’s fine, I love this house. I love it and am grateful for a roof over my head. And there is a yard, and there is furniture in that yard to sit on before dusk, before the bugs swarm. And I like the yard, planting things in it, tending to it, having people over to talk about books in it, but it is not quite the same thing as having that back porch which just felt like absolute heaven in the summertime.

I do have a front porch in this new house but it was a bit run down and faded, the paint on the floor was cracked and graying. I kept moving furniture around and on and off it. I didn’t know what the vibe was on that porch. Sometimes it takes a while to figure these things out.

But then this summer, after I got back in town from my time in North Carolina, I felt an urge to do some home improvement. Oh god, just stop daydreaming and do the thing you can afford, I thought. You’ve got a perfectly good porch sitting there.