When my family visited my maternal grandmother during the springtime, we sat on her screened in front porch before the onset of a sweltering Louisiana summer, at which time we visited inside with the air conditioner. The view of her front yard from the porch in the spring and autumn months was intoxicating. You felt as if you were sitting inside a bouquet of untouched flowers beneath a pristine airy sky.
The house was in the center of the yard, which was surrounded by azalea bushes, petunias, and moss sheltered trees, so the heat wasn’t the only reason we sat on the front porch instead of going in the house, it was because we couldn’t resist being outside.
The front porch had two front doors, one for humans and a door my grandmother had built at the bottom of the front porch window for her beloved German shepherd, “Sam,” whose door remained swinging from the top hinges after his death. I loved to enter the porch through Sam’s door and of course, play with it although my grandmother prohibited it. Sam’s door was built for Sam and when a hinge broke or the wood cracked, she had it fixed, she never removed the door.
