A Love Note to My Dilapidated Front Porch

Alexandra Szczupak
3 min readSep 3, 2020

Hey, you. Yeah, you, with your exposed cinder-block foundation and twisty wrought iron balustrade. Thank you for letting me sit on you. You’ve provided me with a welcome escape from the living room throughout this global pandemic.

You make a superb platform to sit upon to cast disapproving stares at passersby and an excellent barrier to that guy who walks by everyday around 5 pm and shoots me the finger guns, “Eyyyy. Ya got the best seat in the house.” Thank you, sir. I don’t need to be told.

When I stumble home and collapse on you — letting out a chimeric hiccup-belch — your concrete steps are there to catch me, providing my wobbly legs the necessary reprieve from traversing the neighborhood with a road soda in hand, binge-listening to podcasts. I’m sure the neighbors might think I have a problem as they have floor seats to my nightly concerts brought to you by a Craigslist banjo and cheap Canadian beer. But you accept me, flaws and all. By the way, I’ll make sure to pick up those empties tonight.

And it doesn’t matter that every terrier breed in the zip code stops to take a dump in your front yard, you’re pretty enough on your own — even though your mustache is quite often covered in poop. You don’t need all the fanfare like that of the neighboring McRowhouses, with their knock-off Grecian columns and ostentatious landscaping that all but shout, “we are paid a livable wage.”

And what some — especially our downhill neighbor — might call a design flaw veering on…

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