Life in These Parts

Fictional accounts of life in the Upper Delaware River Valley

By TOM KANE

Rocking chair

Last summer, I found an old cane rocking chair at a used furniture store down in Doonsbury. It was a real find. It cost me $55—a bargain. I’d been looking for a chair like this for years.

It isn’t just any rocking chair I’m talking about. This is a chair with seat and back made of soft cane fibers, the kind that encourages long sittings, that were so common back in the old days in Philadelphia when I was a boy. The old neighborhood in Philadelphia was a place of row houses, each with its own tiny porch in the front where people could sit out.

The rockers aren’t made anymore, at least not in the numbers they once were when young ladies in long dresses sat on front porches waiting patiently to be swept away by desperate young men.

I established my new rocker on my front porch with its commanding view of the road in front of my house, where I could watch the drama of everyday country life play out before me. I’d see not only deer, but flocks of turkeys, and an occasional fox. The deer didn’t hesitate to come right up to my house and forage on the feeder that I put out for the birds.

The farmer up the road uses these fields around my house to coral his young heifers, getting them ready to become mothers and thereby milkers, as well as the horses he owns and the ones he boards for other residents of the county.

I just sit out there on late summer afternoons and rock the way my mother used to. She was a poor widow left with four small children at the beginning of the Great Depression, unable to imagine how she and her little family would survive. She would sit out on the front porch of the tiny row house in West Philadelphia, rocking away her cares. For her, it was a form of meditation, a kind of therapy. The rhythmic movements, the steady breathing, the lack of thought, placing herself and her family in the hands of God—the God that was so important to her.

As I rock at twilight each evening, I too begin to meditate and feel myself at one with the universe stretching out before me in these fields and this valley. It’s then that the thought often occurs to me that what the world needs is more rocking chairs. Maybe we should send an ample supply to troubled places like Northern Ireland, the Balkans and the Middle East. They could all sit around on their rockers and try to resolve the differences between themselves. After a few sessions of rocking, perhaps those differences may lose some of their intensity.

The other wonderful thing about my front porch is that it helps me get to know my neighbors. Even if it’s a simple wave to them when they drive by, it connects me to the world around me. Once in a while, one of them will pull up into my driveway, come up to the porch, sit on a rocker and just chat. Millie Raisler stopped one day to tell me about the up-coming vote on the merger of the three small school districts in the area. She wanted me to vote in favor and she gave me all the reasons why I should. I wouldn’t have known about the important vote if she hadn’t stopped by. My front porch was the reason she did.

So you see, front porches have a lot to tell if we would only sit, rock, look and listen. It’s really a shame that new houses being built today have no porches in the front facing the road or street and no rocking chairs to complete the picture.

What is it that we’ve lost? We’ve lost simplicity, relaxation, meditation, neighborliness, free therapy, and most of all, appreciation for the simple rhythms of life. The rhythms of life are slipping through our fingers because we have no time to sit on our front porches any more, listen, wave to our neighbors and just rock.