The porch came back this week. I do not mean the structure, which has been there all winter, but the use of it. The first morning warm enough to take coffee outside happened on Saturday, and I have been on the porch for at least an hour every morning since.

The chair I sit in is the same one I sat in last summer and the summer before. It is a wooden chair with a flat back and a thin cushion, not particularly comfortable, and the reason I sit in it is that it faces the part of the yard with the most activity in the morning hours, which is the dogwood, the feeder beside it, and the small stretch of open lawn between the porch and the back fence. From the chair I can see almost everything that moves in the yard without having to stand up.

The Same Chair, the Same View

The first morning back on the porch is one of the year’s better small thresholds. The cold air still has a bite to it at six in the morning, but the sun comes over the neighbor’s roof at about ten past seven and reaches the chair shortly after, and from that point until about eight-thirty the porch is in direct sun and the air warms enough that I do not need a second sweater. The chickadees are already calling. The cardinal is singing from his branch. A single robin is on the lawn working the wet grass under the bird bath. Nothing about this is unusual. All of it is the thing I wait for through the winter.

What I do on the porch in the morning is not interesting to describe. I drink coffee. I read for a while. I look up from the book when something moves in the yard, which is often, and then I look back at the book. Sometimes I bring out the notebook and write a few sentences down. Sometimes I do not. The morning has the shape of an open hour that I am not trying to fill, and the value of it is the openness.

What an Open Hour Does to a Day

I have come to think that the porch hour is one of the most important hours of my year. Not because anything happens during it. Because it gives the rest of the day a starting point that is calm rather than reactive. I do not check the phone before the porch hour. I do not look at the email. I do not turn on the radio. The first thing my brain encounters in the morning is the yard, and the yard does not have any opinions about me, and by the time the rest of the day arrives I am in a different state of mind than I would have been if I had started with the inbox.

This is not a complicated insight. The slow movement has been making versions of this argument for thirty years and the recommendation has not changed. Start the day with something that is not a screen. Be outside if you can. Pay attention to something that is not yourself or your responsibilities. None of this is news. The hard part is doing it for long enough that the rest of the day starts to depend on it.

A Habit That Returns Each Spring

No Phone, No Radio

I have had the porch hour for somewhere between four and five years now, depending on how you count it. Every spring I worry I will not get back to it. Every spring it comes back the first warm morning of mid-April, and within a week it is a habit again, and by May I cannot imagine starting a day without it. The habit survives the winter underground, like a perennial, and I am always relieved to see it leaf out.

The porch chair was warm in the sun by half past seven this morning. I had been on it since six. The coffee was still hot when I went back inside. I had been outside for 90 minutes, and the day had not started yet, and that, exactly that, was the point. I plan to sit on the porch every morning this week, as long as the weather holds and probably even if it does not, because the year only lets you have this hour for a few months at a stretch.