Well Screened

I had a couple of good ideas for topics for today’s Blog. bitI didn’t write them down, so now they’re lost to posterity forever. I was sitting on our screened-in porch, and I just didn’t want to get up and grab a pen and a piece of paper. The porch does that: it sucks all the motivation right out of you. You sit on the chairs with the new, fat cushions, stare at the trees or the sky and, yup, that seems like activity enough.


Screening is a godsend in Virginia. In Las Vegas, we had a glorious open porch. You didn’t need to worry about flying bugs there. The airways were clear. Granted, you needed to watch where you stepped: sidewinders, rattlers and scorpions might be underfoot. Also granted, Black Widows and Brown Recluses might dangle from a roof eave, but generally you could grab a chair – or indeed, a sleeping bag – and be pretty secure in thinking if you were still, you were safe. Not so in Virginia.

The air here is fraught with danger. We’ve got wasps. We’ve got these stink bugs that won’t bite you, but they’ll certainly annoy you to death. We’ve got wasps, we’ve got bees, and we’ve certainly got mosquitoes. A few years ago we somehow imported a new kind of mosquito that has a vicious bite. It’ll leave you scratching for DAYS. None of these beaties gets onto the porch, though, or at least not many do. And so from now until it hits the high 90s, we can enjoy our outdoor living room.

The porch is on the rear side of the house. Because of the slope of the land, it looks waaay down onto the neighbor’s driveway but is hidden from the street. In the morning we go out with coffee and the paper while waving our neighbors off to school and work. Come four thirty, we head back out, this time with a glass of wine and some snacks. Sometimes we can get our neighbors to join us. It’s difficult. When we see them drive home from work, we have to shout, “Hey, Cynthia,” or “Hey, Richard. Come on up.” And they do. It’s such hot work getting them over that we have to open another bottle of wine.
In fact, it’s close to 4:00 right now. I don’t want to be sitting here trying to come up with something to write about. To heck with this writing business, I’m going to check the door of the refrigerator for what Steve has chilling and goout there to finish the crossword puzzle and think about nothing.