About
When I was a fifteen my family and I moved from our split level brick house in town to a cabin we had built on the flattest of some fifteen acres of rolling lush farmland in the country. The land had once supported beef cattle and the topsoil was rich with nutrients, microscopic and renewable in the dark moist underground, and the blades of fescue grass grew thick and green and were buoyed by their stems like the fingers of a massive sea plant on the breeze that swept down on the foothills from the southern highland mountains. Dissecting the farm down the middle was a creek of considerate size, creating a long narrow valley between two slopes where a mixture of tall nutty hardwoods and clusters of fragrant cedars took root amongst the rocks and mayapples and flourished in the fruitful earth. The creek thrived too and flowed clear and cool past the channel bars and through runs and deep shadowy pools which held for us all some wonderment and the current lapping the creekside and spilling over the smooth glossy rock and sounding up the hillside where sat our two story house.
The cabin was built from timber and plans purchased from a log home builder after great deliberation over square footage and design. My parents had grown up in middle America farm country and valued both space and functionality and for that reason the floor plan called for spacious family areas, picture windows and large covered porches. For the build site and orientation, they chose a level section of the field but instead of setting the front of the house toward the road, they turned it to face the woods and the water. The front porch stretched the width of the house and sat high on the foundation, offering anyone so inclined a clear view of the creek and the buckeye trees and blackberry patches that grew along the fencerow on the opposite hillside. This became our gathering place, a spot to sit and share with others our worries and dreams and histories. Our family’s front back porch.
The farm and the cabin have been out of our possession for a long time now, but I was reminded recently of the times I spent on that porch (and other porches, too) contemplating the past, the things I did and were done to me, and thinking about the future. There is never any plan that is foolproof. No one can predict what lies ahead, no more than can they change what happened in the past. Life is handed down to us, to partake, to achieve, to endure. It is a fact and realization that comes to everyone eventually, day by day, minute by minute, on front porches all over the world.
On December 23rd, 2009 my daughter was diagnosed with Type 1 Diabetes. She is eight years old. This is her story and our story too as we all learn to grasp this disease and do what we must to tend to her care. I know you have stories too and I hope you’ll take time and sit down, on my virtual front back porch, and share in this with me.