It was early evening and the after supper ritual had begun where the family gathered on the screen porch. Our across the way neighbors who routinely joined us were in their usual rockers. All of the adults sat in rocking chairs. I was not yet a teenager and my sister was five years younger. I sat on the arm of a chair or the floor; my sister on the floor or a consenting lap.

On this particular evening, my sister had done something that needed correction from our father. Not happy with the outcome, she began to cry. It seems like seconds later there was a tap on the wood frame around the screen. “What are you doing to my baby?” You could hardly make out the figure of the man standing there with a walking stick. He walked across the street from his house at the sound of the cry. He was our county’s Probate Judge and he always wore a three-piece suit and he always walked to his office at the courthouse a few blocks away. In my book he was a true statesman and a kind but stern man, as I remember.

Like all of our neighbors, this gentleman sat on his front porch. Leaning back in his rocker he would prop his black-lace shoes on the white square column next to the steps. From there he kept check on the comings and goings in the neighborhood and occasionally he would lean forward to spit tobacco into the sanded floored front yard. More often than not he hit the orange tree at the edge of the porch.

Evidently orange trees don’t appreciate being spit on with tobacco because this one never grew much higher than my head at that young age.

One time I was mowing the front yard with a push mower. I stopped and went over to the faucett to get some water. I must have been gulping pretty heavily because the same neighbor came over. “You don’t need to drink water that fast when you are hot … it is not good for you,” he said. True or not it is a lesson I learned and still abide by today.

After Sunday dinner, my father would usually be the first one to the front open porch next the screen porch. One by one the family and Sunday visitors would join him on the porch. Around 3 o’clock I would go inside to the kitchen and get a cold biscuit and put a piece of left over ham inside. A ham biscuit and a glass of milk is a taste that stays a lifetime. I know because I can still see it and taste it 50 years later.

I got to thinking last week about how much the front porch is missed in our 21st century world. I was signing off on a check for a refund to a subscriber. I looked to see why the paper was being cancelled.

On the line for reason was written “deceased.” I looked back up the page and I saw a familiar name and below was the address — it was the street where I live. I did not know we had lost a neighbor and I thought how that would have never happened on the street where I grew up.

In my childhood world we had porches and we used them to watch out for each other.