Listen as the pages of the magazine come to life in the Storytellers podcast showcasing the voices of six Our State writers. Each podcast episode features a writer reading their column aloud, allowing each distinct voice to shine. Click below to listen to Editor in Chief Elizabeth Hudson read her column aloud. 

My grandmother’s house, a tidy Craftsman-style bungalow, is long gone now. A parking lot sits there instead, hot and flat and forgettable, paved right over the place where the gravel driveway once crunched under the tires of my grandfather’s slow-moving Buick, where the fig tree pressed its broad leaves against the old shed out back.

But still — still — I walk those rooms in my mind. I feel the hardwood floors cool against my bare feet as I wander into the kitchen, where my grandmother rolled out biscuit dough on the kitchen table, where pound cake cooled on a wire rack. She’d cut two slices — one for her, one for me — and lay them on her Blue Willow plates, a quiet act of love in the middle of an ordinary afternoon.

I can drift down the hallway to the bedroom where I played dress-up with treasures pulled from her cedar-scented closet and drawers, dabbing Rose Milk lotion onto the backs of my hands like some fine lady, dusting my face with a powder puff pulled from a floral box, the air around me forever faintly sweet.

But always — always — I end up on the porch, the place I remember best, the cool heart of the house where time slowed in the lazy sway of summer.

The porch was deep and wide, shaded by hedges she trimmed herself. I spent whole afternoons in the white wooden swing backed by a tangle of antique roses that climbed up a trellis, their fragrance thick and heavy in the heat, steeping the air like tea. My grandmother sat close by in one of the two rocking chairs, the space between us filled with nothing but ease. We listened for birds — for the low call of a mourning dove, for the bright chatter of a Carolina wren.

At the far end of the porch stood a table her father, Walter Allen, had built, and on it, a glass ashtray caught the sunlight. And everywhere, great green ferns filled the rest of the porch, their fronds sprawling outward and upward toward some higher grace.

I can no longer sit on that porch. But now and then, by nothing more than luck or the secret work of angels, I find myself in a place that feels a bit like it, a place where the air is cool and the day is in no particular hurry, and neither am I.

Not long ago, I spent a few days at The Sunset Inn in Sunset Beach. My room looked over the marsh, and just beyond the front door and the little kitchenette was a porch outfitted with a white wooden swing, just like the one I remember, and two rocking chairs, their pillows faded and flattened thin by years of good company.

I settled into that swing and let it carry me forward and back, forward and back, my feet brushing the worn floorboards beneath. By early evening, I heard the lonesome call of a mourning dove, the oldest song in the world, and for a long, sweet while, the years fell away.

Elizabeth Hudson
Editor in Chief