The Last Evenings on the October Porch

There is a week in October when the porch stops being a place and becomes a habit. The screens are still in the tracks. The storm windows lean against the wall inside the front door, waiting to be screwed into place and turn the house over to the cold. The evening light arrives low and sideways, a yellow that seems less to shine than to be poured across the floorboards. In July the same light was white and flat. Now it is warm for about an hour, and then it is gone.

The porch in October is a room with a deadline. Nobody says it out loud, but everyone who sits on it knows: every clear evening is a withdrawal from a shrinking account. The sitting gets more attention than it did in August, when it was a given. In August the porch was an outside room. In October it is a last-chance room, and the difference shows in how people use it. They sit out in coats they have not yet admitted are coats, saying the air is brisk, holding mugs of hot cider that cool too fast and get refilled from the pot by the door.

The floorboards hold the day's warmth at six. By eight they are cold, and this is the hour the porch is best at. The light has gone from amber to gray, the lawn has gone dark, and the windows across the yard glow a warm, ordinary yellow. There is no reason to stay out except that the inside rooms have not caught up to fall, so people linger until the cold decides for them. The screen door slaps, louder than it did in summer — a quick, hard sound, the sound of a house asking to be closed.

Some nights the wind comes up. The leaves gather against the bottom step and make a sound like a stack of paper being shifted. The air smells of the last of the year: cold dust, dry leaves, the faint mineral scent of the first frost settling into the grass after dark. The porch is the best place to stand in it — still a little of the house, a halfway point, a place to watch the dark come down without being in it.

The Accumulation

The pumpkins did not arrive all at once. The first one came in late September, by mistake — a small round one bought at a farm stand because it was the right size, and then it sat on the top step for a week before anyone admitted it was the season. Then the mums came home from the grocery store, two pots of rust and yellow, and the doormat was changed, the green one carried around to the side of the house to wait for spring. Then the real pumpkins arrived, chosen for weight and oddity, in a tangle of vines in the back of a car, and the porch began to accumulate.

October is the only month that shows its work in layers on a porch. There is the layer of daily traffic: the school bag dropped on the glider and forgotten, the mail stacked on the railing, one wet leaf dried to a crackle and blowing in circles until somebody swept it. There is the layer of the harvest: a basket of ornamental squash — the warted ones, the striped ones — and a cardboard box of green tomatoes wrapped in newspaper, ripening on the sill, giving off the smell of vine and newsprint. There is the layer of half-finished work: the bag of potting soil with its top rolled down, the shriveled petunia baskets everybody means to take down on a warmer day and never does, the dry pile of pulled tomato vines at the foot of the steps, waiting for the frost.

The last evenings have a particular shape. It is too cold to sit idle, so there is a task that justifies being out there. Somebody splits a pumpkin open on the railing, spreading the seeds across a sheet of newspaper. The inside of the pumpkin stains the paper a deeper orange, and the smell of it hangs around until the next rain. The seeds will be roasted or scattered for the birds, and it does not matter which, because the work is the point.

Halloween is coming; the porch is where the month's calendar meets the street. The pumpkins are there for the whole month, not just the one night. They frost in the mornings, a faint fuzz on their crowns, and dry off by noon with the rest of the yard. They are not lanterns yet. They are the month's honest furniture, getting colder by the day.

The Night It Goes Inside

There comes a night. It follows a week of merely cool nights, and then the cold comes down from the north and does not stop at the porch; it goes through it. The forecast said "frost," and then it said "freeze," and the second word settled the matter. The cushions are stiff in the morning. The water in the dog's dish on the steps has a film of ice. The season of sitting is over. It ended the way October ends — in one hard, clean stroke. The porch is empty all that day, and by evening the house has made its decision.

The putting-away has an order. Everyone who lives in a house with a porch knows it without discussing it. The wind chimes come down first. Somebody unhooks them from the ceiling, where they have hung since May, and the silence where they hung is enormous. All spring and summer they had been part of the air; gone, they leave the porch sounding like October. The glider and the chairs are dragged across the floorboards, carried down to the basement or around the side to the garage. The cushions go into bags, and the bags sit in the front hall for two days before somebody carries them down. The basement will smell like porch for the rest of the winter.

The side table that held the mugs goes inside and is wiped down — the pale rings of mug bottoms come off with one pass of a rag, the same rings that seemed permanent all October — and it becomes an ordinary indoor table again. It is hard to say why this small cleaning feels like an ending, but it does. The house argues with itself about the geraniums: they can be cut back and carried in, or they can be left to the frost. The argument runs for a day and a half, and the frost decides it.

The cornstalks that were tied to the railing have gone brown and brittle. Somebody pulls them loose and drags them to the back of the yard. The straw bale that braced them stays. A wet straw bale is too heavy to move with good intentions, so it sits at the foot of the steps all winter, softening, turning the color of the mud beneath it — next season's problem before its time.

That night, somebody goes out anyway, not to sit — the chairs are gone — but to stand at the railing in the dark, holding a mug in both hands until it goes cold. It is not a ceremony. Nobody mentions it the next day. But it happens, and then the door closes, and the house is sealed.

The Empty Room

After the moving-in, the porch is a different room. The screens come out, the storm windows go in, and the glass changes everything. The porch can see the yard but can no longer be in it. It keeps a temperature a degree or two warmer than the yard, which is a lie, because a degree or two is not warmth. The floor is swept, then swept again, and the bare boards look twice as wide as they did in September. The space becomes a winter room: firewood stacked against the inside wall, boots lined up, the container of rock salt by the door, the dog's crate in the corner.

The pumpkins stay. They are the last of it, and the house knows. They stay through Halloween and past it. The frost gets them and they soften. Their color drains from orange to a bruised, blotchy orange, then to a sagging brown. Cracks appear, and the smell — sweet and faintly rotten, the smell of a frozen pumpkin — hangs around the steps until some Saturday in November when somebody picks them up and carries them to the back of the lot. Then the steps are bare for the first time since September.

The porch will not be sat on again until spring. It cannot be. The cold that collects behind the storm windows is worse than the cold of the yard, because the porch looks like it should be warm and is not. It has been put away the way the wind chimes were put away, the way the cushions were put away. Down in the basement, the stacks of them wait in the dark, smelling of October.

And the porch waits too, with its bare boards and its view of a yard that belongs now to the cold. It will come back in May, when somebody carries the chairs up through the house and out the door, and the porch will be a place again — and nobody will think about it until October comes around and makes it true all over again.