Ahhhh. It was HOT this weekend. Hot in a breezy, balmy, lovely way, not a dog-days way, so we spent much of our time strolling around our neighborhood and lazing around our screened-in porch. The screened-in porch is our FAVORITE room in the house. (When you live in the South, you can call a porch a room.) We had it built last spring as an anniversary gift to each other. Or ourselves, depending on how you look at it. We love it even more because it was so hard-won. Our first summer in our house we realized we had a little mosquito problem. By that I mean, any time you even peeked into the backyard, a swarm of silent, tiny, vicious, west nile-bearing insects immediately formed a cloud around your bare legs. But since they were so silent and tiny, you didn't notice at first. It was only when the you started to get a little itchy that you would look down, see five or twenty bumps beginning to rise angrily on your knees, feet, and ankles (because mosquitoes seem to know where the itch will be most maddening) that you realized that you'd just been feasted upon. Cue running back into the house, cursing, and dousing yourself in DEET which, in addition to being a bit creepy (I mean, who likes lotioning up with POISON?) was smelly, sticky, and made your previous mosquito bites even itchier.




So we called a builder. He came out to the house and noted, ahem, that looming over our house were two hundred-year-old oak trees.




"Um, those are kind of in the way," he said.




"Well, can't you kind of slant around it?" I said. "You could even have the tree come up through the porch. I've been to some restaurants where they do that."




The builder could do it, too. It would be an architectural feat, but he could do it. For $25,000 to $30,000 dollars.




Then we got depressed. And winter came and we tabled our dreams of screened-in comfort.




But as spring loomed again, we heard about a guy. A guy in the neighborhood named Bean. (When you live in the South, sometimes people are named Bean.) He wasn't one for words. And he was kind of hard to track down. His work wasn't fancy. But he was real, real cheap.




It took us weeks to get Bean to return our calls and even more for him to mosey on over and build our porch. "No prob," I said. "But it'd be nice if you could do it before our baby arrives. It's due May 17th."




On May 3rd, as he was hammering away, we rushed to the hospital. Bean helped us load our suitcase--packed at the last minute and bulging--into the car, wished us well in his laconic, Beanish way, and promised to lock the gate on his way out. It always struck me as funny. Bean was the last person we saw before our lives changed forever. Bean!




When we brought LaLa home a few days later, the porch was finished. And ever since, I've thought of it as LaLa's porch. During the early, reflux months, I spent hours walking laps around it, bouncing her in her sling, because she seemed to like the outdoor air. Now she's scooting around it on her hands and knees, pointing at the squirrels and birds through the screens and gazing up at the oak trees through the skylights. And she hasn't gotten a single mosquito bite.




Which is a long way of saying, it's gonna be a LOVELY spring. (Sorry to you Northerners, if this sounds gloaty. Or at the very least premature. You have my permission to be gloaty right back when you're enjoying your July and we're SWELTERING down here.)




xoxo




Elizabeth