The Back Porch and Hollow Pillars

Event Date: 1979–1982 Drafted: 2025-11-23

The back porch was the border between the “house world” and the “farm world.” Inside meant rules, chores, quiet voices, wash your hands. Outside meant mud, goats, Dori, and adventure.

But beneath the back porch lay an entirely different universe.

The support posts were hollow concrete pillars with narrow openings at the top — too small to see inside, too dark to guess what lived in there. They were like deep wells with mysterious contents, and somehow, all my smallest toys seemed to end up inside these concrete caverns.

I’d sit on the porch boards, peering into those narrow gaps, certain that if I could just stick my head in a little further, I’d see the lost treasures: • the red plastic soldier • the metal tractor wheel • the blue Matchbox car • the mysterious thing I thought was treasure • the things I dropped and the things I only imagined existed

But the gap was always too small.

I’d stretch my arm in as far as I could, shoulder jammed against the rough cement edge, heart pounding with the possibility that I might feel a familiar shape in the darkness. I never did.

Those pillars became mythic. If something fell in, it was gone forever — claimed by the underworld beneath the porch.

Even now, when I picture the house in my mind, I can’t help but think: Somewhere under that porch, sealed in the dark, my childhood still lives.