We hardly ever step foot onto or off of our east porch.  Certainly not in the winter.  It leads directly onto a vast expanse of lawn.  No paving stones or pathway through the garden.  Just grass which seems always wet in winter and always in need of mowing the rest of the year.  It is, to all intents and purposes, our ‘back porch.’

Nevertheless, even though it is seldom used, the porch has been in great need of replacement in recent years.  The decking first developed old-age cracks, then gaps, and then it began looking snaggle-toothed around the edges.  I thought that we’d have to cordon it off with yellow tape.

When the porch troubles first began someone told us that the entire structure – posts, railings and all – would have to be replaced.  The railings involve intricate, handmade gingerbread and ever since that pronouncement, the dollar signs fairly dance across the porch each time I look at it.

Unfortunately, even though it is seldom used these days, that east porch is an important architectural element to the house, for it is in reality the front porch.  Like most houses constructed in Oysterville in the 1800s, ours was built facing the bay – central to all of the village activity in those early days when the only way into or out of the area was by water.

‘Roads,’ such as they were, developed gradually and, until automobiles began showing up in the 1920s, they were sandy (or muddy, depending on the weather) rutted wagon routes that led to the farthest farms but not beyond.  Our house, like everyone’s, had a ‘back entrance’ on the west where firewood was dropped off and another on the south where tradesmen and farmhands came on errands.  But it was the east door that was the main entrance to the house.

Originally, there had been three more streets between the house and the bay but by the time of my mother’s childhood they were fading into obscurity.  Behind the house, Fourth Street, now known as Territory Road, became the main thoroughfare and our erstwhile back door became the front.  When my folks retired here in the early 1970s, one of mom’s childhood friends came to call and mom was so touched that she came to the old front door – the only person, mom said, who remembered.

These days the importance of that front porch is not so much as an entry point, but as a backdrop in photographs.  It’s one of the building’s distinctive features and I am delighted to report that it is being repaired.  The earlier “all or nothing” prediction, which we could ill afford, turned out to be untrue and, though the day will undoubtedly come that we have to face the prospect of recreating that gingerbread, for now it’s simply new decking in progress.  Hooray!