Here stands my humble front porch. Not the antebellum Southern front porch with giant, white columns and the soaring blue ceiling above. Painting the ceiling a soft shade of blue was once believed to scare away evil spirits. Not to mention fooling unwanted spiders and buzzing insects into thinking the blue was the sky. The color was believed to be good luck, and if it kept away the creepy and crawlies mentioned above, that was indeed good luck.
Another old, Southern superstition promised that the act of burying a dish cloth under the back porch was a sure-fire way to remove warts. I don't guarantee results on that one. As a child I was scared half to death of owls. The saying went that if you heard a hoot owl call as you lay in your bed at night that someone was going to die, and soon. Well, I heard and I thought that someone was going to be me. I tied a knot in many a corner of my top sheet since that was supposedly the only way to save yourself. Did adults then enjoy terrorizing children?
Well anyway, we don't congregate as much as we once did on our porches, nor in our churches. What a shame. With all the devices we now have to communicate, it seems we have lost the personal touch of interacting. We need to get back our since of community and helping one another.
So, grab a glass of sweet tea. Invite someone over. Or, just go out there on the porch with family. If someone sees you, they may just 'mosey' over for a visit. And some porch talkin'.
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