For the next month or so, True Stories Well Told will feature writers I have met through First Monday, First Person, my “salon” for memoir writers held at the Pinney Branch Library in Madison.

By Sally Young

I got an email from a friend saying she spent the afternoon sitting on the porch, drinking lemonade. I wrote back saying, “Oh, that is the essence of a Midwestern summer day.” Lemonade on the porch? Hmmm, suddenly the floodgates of my memory opened.

I grew up in a turn-of-the-century home in Minneapolis. We had a huge screen porch that spanned the width of the house. It had battleship gray decking on the floor and a warm, burnished wood ceiling that looked like ship’s decking. In summer, the porch was the center of our family life. It housed two oversized white wicker rockers with dark green cushions that my mom had made, a picnic table with benches that could seat 12, a stand-alone roaster to keep from heating up the kitchen, a day bed, and a variety of house plants sitting on the wicker end tables along with our ever-present gold and white TV trays.

Best of all, the porch had two eye hooks secured in the ships-deck ceiling. These eye hooks could support any number of hanging or swinging items. When my brother and I were little there was a red rocking horse that had handles on its head and a movable joint between its head and torso. It could be straddled and pumped, much like a swing. Then as we got older, there was a trapeze where I could practice hanging upside down and my older brothers could show off doing pull ups. Later in our family’s life there was the classic oak porch swing.

In the summer, long before air conditioning, we would eat dinner on the porch every night, even though this meant carrying our food, drinks, and dishes all the way from the kitchen on the opposite side of the house. My mother, always working towards efficiency in her efforts to feed the six of us, had drafted an aluminum serving cart not unlike the dessert carts often seen in restaurants. We would load up that cart with as much stuff as it could hold, thus saving many trips of traipsing back and forth between the kitchen and the porch.

Although it was over 60 years ago, I have a clear memory of one balmy summer evening when I was alone on the porch. I was sitting in one of the wicker rocking chairs, reading a book. The night was dark and the crickets were singing. A glass of lemonade sat on the table next to me. In that moment, for some unknown reason, I became acutely aware of myself. And, perhaps for the first time, aware of myself as part of the larger world. As I think back on that moment, a picture comes to mind of me surrounded by the glow of the lamp within the enormous dark circle of night. There I was, safe, warm, and content in my little world.

I think about that time in the larger context of the world today. This was before Kennedy was shot, long before climate change, PFAS, or concealed carry. For some of us, it was a time of innocence. The existential threat of nuclear war felt more abstract than real. We did have a make-shift bomb shelter, but there were no nuclear bombs going off, so it was easy to keep that fear at arm’s-length.

I think about kids today and how their innocence about the world is lost at a young age. They have active shooter drills and climate lessons in first grade. Their active shooter drills are connected to actual events in schools just like theirs and the climate lessons are connected to very real climate events that are part of their everyday lives.

As they grow into adulthood, will they have some long-forgotten memory of a moment when they too felt safe and warm in the world? Will they be able to look back and see themselves as part of a world that is as benevolent as lemonade on the porch on a warm summer evening?

©2023 Sally Young

Sally is a perpetually-almost-retired therapist who works with adults with autism. After living in Wyoming and California, she came home to her roots in the Midwest to attend graduate school. A major part of her dissertation research entailed understanding the value of writing personal narrative. Sally spent several years in the 1980s waging a war with words. Today, she has made a truce, and is now learning how writing her own stories opens the heart.