Thunderstorms & Front Porches

I'm a pretty nostalgia-ridden person. I love the way certain things bring you back to a previous place in your mind. The smell of snow in the atmosphere evokes Christmas and all it encompasses, the feel of low sunlight and Andrea Bocelli brings me back to the summer I was ten, and anytime it storms in the summer, I'm with my grandfather on the front porch at my grandparents' house.

The house is one of those standard older homes, and I spent so much of my childhood there that it's inextricable from my memories. The first poem I ever had published was one I wrote about a tree in the backyard that was actually four trees woven into one, with a perfect spot in the middle for my tiny being to squeeze in to write and daydream. The bush in the front yard with yellow flowers we would pick and throw into jars of water and call it perfume (oh, dear), and the cigar tree in the back yard with the huge leaves we used to think we could string together and make a "flying machine" with to take us around the world. My cousins, my sister, and I were quite characters.

My favorite memory, though was sitting on the porch in those hot hazy summer days and talking to my grandfather, my Puppa. The porch was brick, the awning was burgundy, and the creaking porch swing was one of those green and yellow vinyl numbers from the 1970s, host to numerous behinds, porch-sleepers, and a six-year-old version of me who ate too much pasta and then rocked there with my head in my grandmother's lap until I acquainted that pasta with my pink hi-top Converse.

He was off-the-boat Italian at 13. He fought in World War II. I never heard him say a bad word about anyone. He would sit there, in his chair on the porch, staring straight ahead, hazel eyes, white hair combed back and softly curling, and those blue pants everyone over age 70 owns. Sometimes we would just sit in silence, which was always comfortable. He was a man of few words, but sometimes he would break me out of my reverie to talk.

"What are you thinking about? You always look like you're thinking about something," he said to me once. Perhaps I got that from him.

He shared stories of WWII and life on his little farm in Potenza. He told me about what it was like coming here. We talked about my parents splitting up, and about school, and my dreams to be a writer or a musician someday. Often, my sister and my mum joined us. Nunna would come out and join us too, after the three of them finished their post-dinner cowboy coffee in the old Sands mugs. Occasionally, my cousins would come sit with us too, but I secretly liked best when it was just the two of us. I loved the stories. I loved the companionable silence, or the laughter we'd share watching the neighborhood and all its movements, with the long, lonely train whistle as the soundtrack-- these moments the pulse of my otherwise awkward childhood years, all hair and gangly limbs.

When it would storm, we would sit there and watch the lightening crash and the rain pour, rolling in heavy drops off the edges of the scalloped awning. It was terrifying and awesome at the same time to be so close to something so dangerous. God's bowling, the adults would say, which made it less frightening somehow.

Perhaps this is why I still have such an affinity for people's front porches-- less common these days. This could be why I am drawn to the way the lightening dances majestically across the sky, even as the thunder makes me leap out of my skin. All during June, the heaviest month of storms in a Pittsburgh year, I think of my Puppa and miss him fiercely. When I see the thunder rolling in and I detect that smell on the breeze, the one that means the skies darken to a grey-green and the rain lets go, I think of him and I feel close to him again.