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<img src=’/images/IMGP9669Hawaiianart.JPG’ alt=’’ />
<img src=’/images/IMGP0043.JPG’ alt=’Squirrels in Montreal\'s St.
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"The porch" was what we called the long narrow room off the living room of our 1930s Dutch Colonial house, but I doubt if its interior had ever been exposed to the fresh, warm breezes of spring. Windows stood side-by-side on three walls. The windows would have let in sunlight if it hadn’t been for the eight-foot-tall evergreens that blocked the rays that might have sneaked in between the Venetian blinds.
The porch could be closed off from the living room by a pair of white-curtained French doors on either side of a fireplace. The fireplace, which was lit just once during the twelve years I lived in that house, stopped the doors from touching the wall. There was just enough room behind the opened doors for a child or a slender adult. I sometimes hid there from my mother, but quickly tired of standing upright, without even enough room to hold a book in front of me.
The linoleum floor was cold and smooth to my touch. Gold-colored horizontal and vertical lines fenced off squares the color of dried blood. The floor’ s surface was pitted where the legs of tables and chairs had ground in circular depressions. When my mother had me mop the porch, I could see where the brass tray-table that rested on wooden legs had left its impression in the middle of the floor.
A beige sectional sofa snaked around the edge of the room, flanked at either end by marble-topped tables. Then came a hi-fi, one of those mammoth, glossy wooden pieces of furniture that housed a record player in the 1960s, and finally an unvarnished bar holding liquor bottles on top and glasses underneath. When I visited the porch, most often it was to listen to my father’s recordings of Gilbert & Sullivan’s "Mikado," the Kingston Trio or Tom Lehrer or to read by myself or to play with the family cat who perched sphinx-like atop the sofa when he wasn’t kneading his claws into its cushions.
After my brother took shop class, a custom-made scratching post for the cat abutted the sofa. My mother had him build a wooden frame and staple on expensive upholstery fabric as a distraction for the cat, who ignored it except when it was freshly rubbed with catnip.