The First Porch Dinner

The table came out in the last week of April, on a Thursday evening when the sun was still up at suppertime and nobody could stand the kitchen one more minute. My wife said, “Let’s eat out there,” and everybody looked out the window at the porch as if we had never seen it before. Then we moved.

We carry the same table every spring, an old oak thing with legs that fold under it, heavy as sin. It spends the winter in the mudroom under a stack of seed flats and my father-in-law’s magazines. My daughter and I took one end each and walked sideways through the door, and we hit the jamb. We hit the jamb every year. The table landed on the porch planks with a sound like a drum, and the chairs came out one by one, including the one with the wobble and the one with the cane seat coming loose.

The food was asparagus and eggs, and there was bread and butter, and the salad made that sound a salad makes when you toss it. We ate with the porch door open. I could hear the tap running and the kettle going, and the house was so close that we were not quite outside, or not quite in. That is the trick of a porch dinner. The line between inside and out gets smudged for one evening.

The light lasted through the meal. That is the main thing. We didn’t turn on the porch light. The sky went from silver to pale blue to the deep color that sits above the streetlights, and the birds went quiet in stages. The neighbor across the fence kept doing something with a hose long after it mattered. A car came down the street with its headlights on, and my wife said, “See, I told you,” and put a sweater on without another word.

Then the cold came up off the ground. It did not fall out of the sky; it rose. Under the table, around our ankles, out of the bricks and the dark dirt where the crocuses had finished and the daffodils were holding on. Our daughter was barefoot and announced that everything below the table was different weather. She went inside for socks and came back with socks on her hands, and nobody corrected her. She put her warm hands flat on the table and said the table was still warm from the sun, and it was, though the sun had been gone for an hour.

You could feel the line of it, level with your knees. Above the table, the air was still soft, the way April air gets when the sun has been on it all day. Below, a different current moved, slow and damp, out of the ground itself, as if the earth were exhaling. It smelled like wet mulch and cold clay.

We cleared the plates in the chill. The first trip inside, then a second for the salt and pepper and the bread board. The table stayed on the porch, gray in the dark, and I went out once with my hands full of napkins. I ran a hand across the top, and it was still faintly warm, or I wanted it to be. That is the difference between April and any other month. The ground is still holding March, no matter what the air says.

Every year we say we’ll eat outside earlier. Every year we wait until some warm day when the sun is already low, and we sit down knowing the meal will end in sweaters. It is not a comfortable meal. It is not meant to be. It is the porch remembering what it is for, and the house remembering that it is not the whole world. The first porch dinner of the year has nothing to do with the food. It has to do with carrying a table out through a door that is too narrow, hitting the jamb, and feeling the cold come up off the ground before the plates are cleared. And with the small settlement we make with the cold: we know it is coming, and we sit down to the table anyway.

Then the next morning the table is still there, wet with dew, and the coffee cups go out before breakfast, and that is when we know the season has turned.