The Empty Porch Swing

It’s the porch swings that did it

They hang under eaves and arbors, lengthwise like punctuation, perfectly aligned as if awaiting a return that never quite arrives. Morning after morning, evening after evening, I walk past them and count absences. I keep an imaginary ledger of what doesn’t happen out here: no coffee steaming in the cool before sunrise, no toddler’s rubber-soled thump, no neighbor carrying over the leftover dessert because it’s “too much for two.” The swings are props from a play that closed years ago; the set remains, but the actors have gone home.

Our development is a study in repetitions. Two-car garages, stucco the color of wet sand, driveway seams swelling like veins under the heat. Nineties-era assurances cling to architecture: granite countertops in interesting colors, suited to high rollers, the arched niche for a television that once weighed sixty pounds. A gated entrance bestows ceremony on arrival. The keypad blinks its permission; the gate opens. Distance masquerades as dignity. The streets here curve as though shy of a straight line, as if their engineering is a choreography of avoidance. Wide lanes, cul-de-sacs, roundabouts that nudge you past one another without requiring eye contact. The homeowners’ association has refined the ceremony. Visual harmony, they call it. Earth tones only. Yard ornaments capped at twelve inches, lest whimsy threaten the skyline. Even eccentricity must remember its place. The result is beautiful, and it’s a clean and bloodless symmetry, the kind of polish you see on a model home or a hospital corridor. From a distance, it reads as order. Up close, it feels like a trap.

At dusk, the air conditioners take the measure of the neighborhood and set the tempo. Their hum is a single organism breathing, compressors inhaling and condensers exhaling, until you cannot tell where one house ends and the next begins. Blue light from televisions paints the windows. Fabric softener wafts through the vents; someone, somewhere, has chosen “fresh rain;” I suppose we find that wherever we can in this dusty valley. A sprinkler ratchets calmly along a gravel bed, making an argument for green that no one bothers to rebut, though natural lawns are slowly and militantly disappearing to desert landscaping and artificial turf.

There’s a line from Robert Frost that survives on magnets and mugs: “good fences make good neighbors.” He said it with an eyebrow raised, but I think many chose to take it as doctrine. Walls sprouted, then cameras; hedges found their edges and held them. Motion lights wait with the piety of parishioners for the slightest sin, some even announcing themselves as I walk past: “Hi! You are currently being recorded.” Near the gate, a Neighborhood Watch sign suggests mutual vigilance, but what we monitor is not each other’s welfare. We are guarding our own perimeter more than keeping the faith, while ten miles west, the Strip detonates every night on schedule. There the transaction is honest: spectacle for attention, noise for money, want for want. Out here, in the suburban quiet, we enact a slower desire, a negative image. The billboards change, the hotel facades reinvent themselves with implausible waterfalls, and we perfect the discipline of withdrawal. Here, a successful life leaves minimal trace. Here, your best neighbors are the ones you never need to know.

I walk, and walking becomes a mode of inquiry. How did we arrive at this? Privacy as paradise, re-tailored every decade and sold with a slightly different pitch? I suspect the experiment has achieved its predictable conclusion. We have domesticated solitude, landscaped it, made it HOA-compliant. We speak of safety, but we mean insulation. We speak of quiet and mean absence. On certain nights, the only voices that carry are from coyotes tuning themselves to the darkness or the insistent murmur of a television left on for background noise, the blue-lit parish of the perpetually reassured.

When I was young, I believed Mr. Rogers when he said it could be a beautiful day in the neighborhood. He had a cardigan that zipped, a voice with the cadence of a lullaby, and a theology of proximity'; our feelings mattered, and so did the people who lived next door. He looked into a camera and made it a kitchen table. He offered an architecture of care with tone, tempo, and repetition. You can build a home out of those if you try. Children understand this instinctively. We are trained out of it. There’s footage of him at a Senate hearing in 1969, explaining why public television mattered. The room looks like every room in which power has ever tried to appear reasonable. He speaks without ornament. “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” he asks, and for a moment an entire apparatus pauses to consider the possibility that anger is a public question. Watching now is like reading a postcard from a country that no longer forwards its mail. Empathy is unserious, we are told. Gentle is naive. No, we have misnamed gentleness as fragility and confused hardness with strength, as if linoleum could pass for stone.

I see the loss of Mr. Rogers in the loss of the porch swing. Two artifacts of a shared premise: that nearness, physical and emotional, could be transformative. That being in view of one another might make us kinder. In this neighborhood, friendliness has become procedural, a gesture you perform with the same care you give your xeriscape rock placement. Wave when appropriate. Smile from the driveway. Do not trespass beyond the property line of conversation. Do we call this civility? Call it what it is, distance.

I allow myself to imagine the early years of this subdivision. Fresh paint baking in June. The promise of something new, which is always the promise of Las Vegas. Someone moves in with high-backed stools and a glass dining table and vows to become the kind of person who hosts. After dinner, they carry two chairs outside and sit beneath the eaves because the brochure said “evening air.” They talk in the idiom of firsts; first mortgage, first neighbor, first time believing that the old ache might be quieted by a new layout. A jogger passes and lifts a hand, the seated couple returns it, and for a pulse of time the exchange feels like the start of a habit. Maybe they go inside and sleep easily, the sort of sleep that comes from believing there is nothing to be on guard against. Maybe the habit doesn’t stick. Most habits don’t.

On Halloween, walking past a yard stitched with solar path lights, I saw a swing move: a small sway, unearned by breeze. I stopped. The chain creaked once, its own timid declaration, and then the quiet reseated itself. I could tell a story about that movement: a bird startled into flight, an eddy of air detouring off the stucco, my own eyes wanting a haunting. Or I could accept the simplest reading, that the air keeps memory, and that we travel through what other people have left behind like scuba divers in concealed currents.

The desert, when it wants to, smells faintly of metal. Irrigation lines sweat a taste of copper into the soil. Dust lifts at the exact angle of a passing car and hangs there, waiting to envelop your clothes. Beyond the neighborhood walls, the Strip vibrates like a nerve refusing to go quiet. The city is awake somewhere, and it refuses to be ashamed. It is both comfort and indictment that the thrum reaches us at all. I think again of that cardiganed man. He didn’t promise that beauty would arrive. He suggested we could conspire with it. The neighborhoods we have built—safer, richer, quieter—have not, I suspect, become more beautiful in the way he meant. Beauty requires participation, which is to say, risk. You have to be seen reading on the front step, which invites someone to say hello, which invites the possibility of being misunderstood. You must look foolish returning a borrowed cup, or admit you do not have sugar, but you do have time.

On the corner of Sagebrush there’s a swing painted white, the paint flaking along the armrest in a constellation of chips the size of sesame seeds. It faces north. Some evenings the orange light smears across it and it looks venerable, an heirloom from a narrative in which neighbors borrowed rakes and returned them with pies. Other evenings it looks like a dare. Sit here, it says. Sit here and be available to the world you chose. It’s always tempting to mythologize better days. We invent golden ages the way we invent alibis. There may never have been a porch-swing era of shared sugar and quiet confidences. People have been busy and tired and private for as long as people have had jobs and disappointments. Even so, walking these corridors of good taste and careful silence, I feel the absence of something small and essential: the ordinary courage of presence. Not a utopian communalism or an endlessly scheduled potluck calendar, just the willingness to be encountered without preface or password.

The swing on Sagebrush shifts again, barely, like a purse strap settling against a shoulder that is no longer there. The chain sighs. The automatic light above a garage clicks off and the house erases itself to dark blue. Somewhere a television begins another episode of a show designed to return the world to equilibrium in twenty-two minutes. In the crosshatched dark, the vacancy is almost tender. I stand there longer than makes sense, inventing a conversation I could have had. “What do you do with the mad that you feel?” What do you do with the lonely? I rehearse lines to neighbors I do not know: I’m Adam, I live on Juniper, the one with the new lawn that didn’t survive a year. Would you like some lemons? Would you like a walk? I imagine the beat of hesitation widening or closing, the split-second where the engineering of our cul-de-sacs either overrules or gets outvoted by our better curiosities.

Then, because imagining is a ritual that wants a body, I sit. Not long. Not ceremonially. Just enough to test the wood flexing under my weight, chain finding its settled pitch. Enough to feel the public air touch skin that has learned to mistake indoors for safety. Enough to become a visible sentence in a paragraph we have not written here in a while. Nothing happens. Which is to say: everything does. The swing makes its small arc. A car turns the corner and does not speed up or slow down, though it was going too fast to begin with. A dog barks twice as if it knows I’m out here listening and looking. The desert keeps its counsel. I am in full view of whoever might be looking and of no one at all. When I stand, the seat sways once, remembering, and I leave it to its ghosts.

On the walk home I pass more swings, their silhouettes like open parentheses, and count possibilities instead of absences. One porch with a small table and two cups inverted against dust. Another with a fan that still works. A third with a set of chairs gathered in an L-shape, none of which I’ve ever seen in use. There is a way to live here that keeps the promises we wanted to believe, not the promise of perfection or safety, but of a beauty that passes between us because we are willing to gather and belong to one another, softly, in the plain light of day or manufactured light of evening.

At my door I feel the old habit push back, the lock, the cool, the rectangle of blue. I let it. But I also leave the porch light on and the door a breath ajar. It’s not a strategy. It’s not even a plan. It’s a tiny philosophy and a small correction, a marginal note in a development that prides itself on clean pages. Tomorrow I will walk again. The swings will keep their secrets. Perhaps one will move and perhaps it won’t. Either way, I will know which one faces north, and I will know that at least once a person sat there, and that it held.

May you be strong in softness.

Love,

~Adam

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