I grew up on a front porch. I don’t mean “growing up” in the traditional sense — getting my driver’s license, going to prom, going off to college. My actual growing up, my real growing up, began after all of that, in grad school and just after, on a string of front porches in Greensboro.

This was in College Hill, an old-growth neighborhood peppered with bungalows and Victorians and four-unit brick apartment buildings. I lived and played and learned there in the late ’90s and early aughts, taught myself how to be a not-terrible boyfriend and maybe a writer and an occasionally competent classroom teacher. We held court on our rented front porches: argued politics and poetics on thrifted sofas, sat on swings and drank beer while we worked out novel ideas and attendance policies, dangled our feet off the steps into kiddie pools. The boundary between classroom and apartment eroded to the point that if you ask me where I got my degree, where I finally knew that I’d spend a lifetime writing things down, where I got a de facto postdoc, I’d tell you it was on a porch. The space evolved from a home base to a center of gravity. We sat out in the evenings and waited for folks to walk by, for something good to start up. I think what I’m trying to tell you is that later on, when my wife and I first looked at our house, before we even walked in the front door, I suspected I was home. It’s a late ’20s Craftsman. The porch runs the whole front of the house.

For Mother’s Day several years back, the boys bought their mom a couple of wrought-iron consignment chairs and a well-worn outdoor sofa. I’ve got snapshots of each boy reading out there, post-pool, wet hair and a hoodie in a yellow summer evening. We bought a sectional during the early days of the pandemic, and now there are two separate spaces for proper lounging. The dog asks at the front door to come out most evenings, loves to bring a toy and watch the dog-walkers and joggers go by. We eat out there in good weather, sit under our ferns and strings of bistro lights and watch the night come down. The neighborhood is a front-porch neighborhood, a wave-and-how-are-you kind of place, and it’s good to watch families come by, good to watch their kids get taller, too. I work out there in the mornings, answer student emails and hammer out a scene or two if things are going well. I’ve got a dream of ceiling fans, but the box fan worked pretty well when my first son was an infant, baseball on the radio and the wind keeping the mosquitoes at bay, and it still does.

A porch, the porch, our porch — a place for coffee. For a book. For a blanket and a glass of wine. For when people come over. A back deck is for privacy, for hiding out. A front porch says hello, says may I meet your dog, says why don’t y’all come over next weekend. We can see baseball-stadium fireworks from here. I’ll step out there in the afternoons to watch a storm roll in. It’s safe. It’s cozy, if an outdoor space can be. It’s been, since I became whatever sort of grown-up I might be, a good first place to land.