Come and sit a spell

I should be embarrassed to tell this tale, but shame's not my strong suit so I'll go ahead and share.

I've lived in a house with a three-season screen porch on the front for 13 years and I've really never used it right. I finally have righted this wrong, and now every single day I think about how it could have possibly taken me 13 long years to figure this out.

The revelation came while on vacation in Door County with my husband's family last month. We were staying at a place that featured little cabins along the lake. (This was not the lap of luxury, as this previous blog post revealed.)

Each little cabin was just a few small rooms with dated, damp furniture, but each one also had a stellar feature -- a screen porch on the front with views of the Green Bay. One night while the boys in our family were out go-karting and other loud messing around, I grabbed a book and headed out to the screen porch to take in what was left of the evening and watch the light fade across the lake.

After 20 minutes or so alone, I was joined by my 13-year-old daughter. She pulled up one of the white plastic chairs (not the most comfortable, but they did the job), plopped down next to me and started talking. And talking. Nearly 90 minutes later, long after the last of the daylight was gone, we were still on that porch and she was just starting to wind down for the night.

If you're not the parent of a teenager maybe this is hard to understand, but in many ways this night, this one single night, was the highlight of my vacation. It's hard to get kids that age to open up like that about everything. It was rare and precious, and if she had never stopped talking, I promise you I'd still be there, riveted to my chair.

Something felt different, really open and free that night. I decided it was the screen porch, calling back to a time when that's where you went to cool off at night before air-conditioning. Before nonstop TV and high-speed Internet connections. Before cell phones that can find you anywhere.

That night I told her how great it was that we talked for so long, and asked her if I dragged some comfy chairs out onto our screen porch at home, would she hang out there with me this summer and just talk?

"Well, I do have a lot more things to do at home than I do here," she said.

Please? I asked.

"Yeah, I would," she said.

Less than two weeks after returning from that trip, I was lucky enough to score a great comfy chair and ottoman secondhand and scrounged up another underused stuffed armchair from inside the house and set them up on the porch. I added a big potted fig tree, a small Ikea table perfect for board games, a little lamp with a stained glass shade, a few strings of hanging lights and the final touch -- a Boston fern. The wooden table and wooden chairs that were there before were moved into the basement for another time.

Thanks to nice summer weather, the porch is now the destination spot in our house. The kids know where to find me just about any time I'm home. We've shared wine with friends on the porch; I even beat my mom at Scrabble there just last week.

And the point of the porch, to get my girl gabbing to me on a regular basis? There's been a lot of that, too.

I'm so sorry this idea didn't come to me sooner because we're enjoying it so much. But I have to say, I'm glad I didn't miss it one minute longer.