I don’t know whose couch it is. It probably belongs to a previous tenant, and they probably don’t want it back. I’m not entirely sure why. I mean, it’s a pretty solid couch. It’s soft enough to sink into, you can put your feet up. But people have their reasons.
In February it sat cold and stiff, exposed to the elements. After the first warm day in March, it started crawling with spiders. (Could that be why it was left behind?) Right now, it’s draped in striped beach towels, adorned in worn sleeping bags. They’re able to provide a bit of coverage on a cool night. And when sat on, they can prevent someone from coming into contact with a stray spider.
Thinking back on it, the front porch couch didn’t actually serve a purpose in my life until about mid-April, when the weather started to feel like spring.
That’s when I started doing my homework outside, when I started pairing my dinners with neighborhood happenings. You see, the front porch couch is such a subtle stoop, an excellent spot to watch situations unravel.
Take last week, for example. From my perch, I watched a father teach his two children how to ride their bikes with the training wheels off. It was a sweet spring day; the sound of a pulsating sprinkler carried across the neighborhood. The kids wobbled along, their father steadied them. All until they were able to steady themselves. Before the sunset, they were zipping up and down the street, two siblings squealing at one another in joy. I don’t know why, but I felt incredibly proud of them. They have no idea who I am.
Still, there are a lot of in-between days where nothing happens. The buses come and go and the cars come and go and the people come and go. The potholes never move and neither do the sidewalks. These are the things that you can count on. And while the porch-summoning texts that my roommates and I send to each other may vary in wording (“porch soon,” “porch date,” “porch tonight”), the heart of the message is always the same.
I’m typing this on the 17th floor of the W.E.B. DuBois library, next to the books about cocaine and other habits that are hard to break. To be completely clear: I’m not addicted to sitting on a porch. That would be embarrassing. (And would that even be possible?) I do enjoy it quite a bit, though.
Last night, my three roommates and I squished side by side on the front porch couch and played word games from The New York Times on our respective devices. We listened to something soft from a joint Spotify session, queuing a few tunes from the porch play time playlist. Our presence was illuminated by a string of Christmas lights on an otherwise dark street. It was a real bittersweet type of thing, to feel the moments slipping and know that there was nothing you could do about it. These were the kinds of things that you needed more than two hands to hold onto. And I didn’t have nearly enough hands.
I’m not sure what I’ll do tomorrow. Maybe take a walk, brush my teeth, eat some fruit. And maybe in the midst of a routine, I’ll think about the front porch couch and how lovely it was to have a place like that, how fulfilling it was to have good people around.
Or maybe I’ll find a spider. Though that’s unlikely. I haven’t seen any in weeks.
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