A few days later, the president of the bank, Hursel Disney, phoned to ask my father why he would write a check for $1,000 when he only had $3 in his account.

"The realtor told me he wouldn't cash it," my father explained.

"Yeah, that's what he tells everyone," Hursel said.

"Tell you what, the cheque just fell off my desk and landed in the back of the trash can. I probably won't find it until next month." (That's the way the presidents of small-town banks did things back in those days.)

And that's how we came to live in a house with a porch.

Porch talk is one of the customs we've let slide out of our lives, not realising how desperately it is needed. This is the irony. We have more talk than ever before but too little communication; so many words but so little meaning. I miss those days of lag time. The magic of our porch talks, I now recall, was not only their depth but their breadth. My grandmother supplied the depth and I provided the scattering of topics. We discussed Lawrence Welk, the Virgin Mary, Richard Nixon, the gold standard and the merits of homemade ice-cream versus store-bought. I especially remember a fascinating talk about my family's history with moonshine.

I do not wish to romanticise the porch. Not all of its talk reached the level of Plato or Jefferson but there was a lustre to those talks, a certain glow and depth lacking in these days of e-mail and instant messaging. Perhaps it was the parenthesis of silence, the bracketing of conversation with reflection.

When my wife and I bought our home, we gave careful consideration to the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Little did we realise the most valuable real estate would be the 200 sq ft of our porch. On it, we have solved all of the world's problems, evening after pleasant evening, arcing back and forth in our wicker swing, the twilight breeze bearing all our cares away.

==

FT REPORT - HOUSE & HOME: The threshold of greatness

By Phillip Gulley, Financial Times
Published: Oct 27, 2007

Several years back, I was visiting an elderly woman reminiscing about her childhood. When I asked her what she missed the most, she closed her eyes and said: "Porch talk. I miss the porch talk."

Social scientists and preachers offer a number of reasons for the decline of civil society in the US: broken homes, poverty, disease, television and increasing secularism, to name a few. But I believe all that is wrong with our world can be attributed to the shortage of front porches and the talks we used to have on them. Somewhere around 1950, builders left off the front porch to save money and we've had nothing but problems ever since.

The first years of my life, I lived in a house without a porch, in the first subdivision in our small town. When I turned nine, a grand old house with a porch came on the market. My parents would drive by it, slowing as they passed. "Wouldn't it be wonderful to live there?" they would say to one another.

Then one Saturday morning, while Dad was walking on the town square, the owner of the jewellery store, who was also the town's real estate agent, stopped him.

"I have just the house for you," he told my father. "The Hollowell place. They're asking $30,000."

"Can't afford it," my father said.

"I can get you in that house for a $1,000 down-payment," the jeweller-real-estate-agent said.

"I don't have $1,000," my father said.

"Write me a cheque and I won't cash it until you have the money," the agent promised.

So my father did, then and there, without telling my mother.

A few days later, the president of the bank, Hursel Disney, phoned to ask my father why he would write a check for $1,000 when he only had $3 in his account.

"The realtor told me he wouldn't cash it," my father explained.

"Yeah, that's what he tells everyone," Hursel said.

"Tell you what, the cheque just fell off my desk and landed in the back of the trash can. I probably won't find it until next month." (That's the way the presidents of small-town banks did things back in those days.)

And that's how we came to live in a house with a porch.

My memory is this: each April, on the first warm Saturday, we would remove the storm windows, haul them up to the attic, carry down the screens and fit them in the windows. The windows and screens, being old and handmade, lacked the exactness of factory windows. Someone had written on each screen, in shaky, old-man handwriting, which window it fit: dining room, south; north-west bedroom, window over register. The screens never did fit precisely. My father would rub a bar of soap along the frames and finesse the screens into place.

With the screens installed, we would carry the stepladder around to the front porch, lower the porch swing to its correct height, to the link in the chain with the dab of red paint, then carry the rocker up from the basement. Thus, porch season commenced.

There was an etiquette to porch sitting. People would approach our porch and stop at the foot of the steps, awaiting an invitation to join us. If one wasn't forthcoming, they knew delicate matters were being discussed and would excuse themselves after a brief exchange of pleasantries. This rule was never discussed or written down but was generally known and obeyed by all, except by children and dull-witted adults.

Porch sitting was an evening pursuit, after the supper dishes were washed and the kitchen cleaned. We children would run underneath the streetlight, shrieking, our hands covering our hair to keep the bats out. Bats, tradition had it, made nests in your hair and drove you mad. My mother and father would watch from the porch, unconcerned, as the bats swooped past, plucking at our heads.

After a while, my mother would call us into the yard, then a while later on to the porch. Coming in for the night was always a progression: street, yard, porch. By the time we reached the porch, we were fading and would arrange ourselves on the railing, our backs to the columns, while the adults visited. If we sat quietly and listened closely, we could hear them discuss matters we weren't ordinarily privy to, stories of certain people in our town who'd moved away without telling anyone.

Some evenings, if my father was feeling expansive. he would share stories of his childhood, about growing up in what he called the "hard times". In later conversations with my Aunt Doris, I learned that many of my father's stories were embellished, which in no way lessened their appeal.

On nights the Cincinnati Reds played, my father would set the kitchen radio on the parlour table, open the window on to the porch and listen to Marty Brennaman announce the game. Lee Comer would wander over from next door to provide local commentary. Lee was exempt from the rules of porch etiquette. He and any member of his family could ascend the steps without asking, and still can, since Lee's son, Ben, now owns the house.

Porch talk is one of the customs we've let slide out of our lives, not realising how desperately it is needed. This is the irony. We have more talk than ever before but too little communication; so many words but so little meaning. I miss those days of lag time. The magic of our porch talks, I now recall, was not only their depth but their breadth. My grandmother supplied the depth and I provided the scattering of topics. We discussed Lawrence Welk, the Virgin Mary, Richard Nixon, the gold standard and the merits of homemade ice-cream versus store-bought. I especially remember a fascinating talk about my family's history with moonshine.

I do not wish to romanticise the porch. Not all of its talk reached the level of Plato or Jefferson but there was a lustre to those talks, a certain glow and depth lacking in these days of e-mail and instant messaging. Perhaps it was the parenthesis of silence, the bracketing of conversation with reflection.

When my wife and I bought our home, we gave careful consideration to the number of bedrooms and bathrooms. Little did we realise the most valuable real estate would be the 200 sq ft of our porch. On it, we have solved all of the world's problems, evening after pleasant evening, arcing back and forth in our wicker swing, the twilight breeze bearing all our cares away.

Extracted from 'Porch Talk' (HarperOne, $15.95)