Tea on the Back Porch

I could tell my father loved my mother dearly.

Not because he said it often. Not because they were romantic in any dramatic way. They were not a movie kind of couple. Their love belonged to a different language: rural, Midwestern, modest, practical. A held hand. A shared cup. A porch at sunset. The kind of love a child absorbs before he has words for it.

They hardly ever fought, at least not where Helen and I could hear. I know now that does not mean there were no disagreements. Every marriage has weather. Maybe they argued after we were asleep, or in low voices out in the yard, or in the car with the radio off. But from where I stood as a child, they seemed aligned. Moving in the same direction. Joined in the same project.

I would see them hold hands when they walked.

I would see them hold hands in the front seat of the car, on long drives and short ones, my father’s right hand leaving the steering wheel and resting across the bench seat until it found hers.

Small things.

But a child notices.

A child especially notices when his parents briefly stop being only parents.

Every once in a while, I would catch them in some gesture that startled me. A hug at the kitchen counter. My father giving my mother a rare pat on the behind, which appalled me completely, and my mother swatting his hand away with an embarrassed laugh. Those little flashes mattered. They let Helen and me understand, even if we didn’t want to understand too much, that our parents existed for each other in some private way beyond lunches, chores, discipline, school clothes, and rides.

They were husband and wife.

Not only Mom and Dad.

What I remember most clearly now is the back porch.

There were two porches on our farmhouse. The longer porch on the east side was where they often sat during the day, with coffee, breakfast, the morning paper, and whatever practical conversation the morning required. But the small back porch was different.

It was only about six feet by six feet, with an overhang and a screen door. Technically it was our main entrance to the house. In the ordinary grammar of the farm, it was where boots came off, groceries came in, kids ran through, and the day passed in and out.

But in my memory, on summer evenings, it belonged to them.

The screen door had one of those long stretching springs that made it slam shut if you did not catch it. That sound still feels like country summer to me. A wooden clap. A metallic twang. The little violence of home settling back into place.

At sunset, my parents would come out with tea.

Lipton, I’m almost sure.

The yellow box.

Orange pekoe, or what their generation called orange pekoe, which seemed to mean ordinary black tea made domestic by repetition. I think that tea came into our house through Grandma Dorothy, who seemed to have a mug of tea going on every surface of her home in West De Pere. My parents drank coffee and tea both, probably more than was reasonable, but evenings were for tea.

Tea on the porch.

Tea at the kitchen table when family came to play cards.

Tea in the yellow box, replenished without ceremony.

A small inheritance steeped in hot water.

It is funny how families pass things down that way. Not as heirlooms. Not as announced traditions. Just through use. A widow in West De Pere keeps tea near her hand, and years later her son and daughter-in-law carry it out to a porch at sunset on a little farmette near the Bay.

My parents were busy people.

This needs to be said plainly because the porch only matters against the pressure of all that work.

My father was at Fort Howard running dryformer machines, sometimes on swing shift. My mother was teaching. The farmette itself was another employer, unpaid and relentless: animals, gardens, repairs, fences, firewood, machines, food, laundry, children, the constant hum of things needing to be done.

There is no such thing as being finished on a small farm.

Only stopping.

And yet they stopped.

That is what moves me now.

They made a pause.

In summer, when the light went gold and the day finally loosened its grip, they met on that little porch with tea and sat together for an hour, sometimes longer, watching the evening settle.

I never heard what they said.

Not once.

That seems important too. Their porch was visible to me, but not audible. I could see the shape of their togetherness without entering it.

Helen and I might be out in the yard, climbing whatever tree had become ours that summer. Chickens scratched through the grass between us and the house. The garden lay somewhere beyond. The outbuildings stood with their familiar shadows. From the porch my parents could see the life they had assembled: the farm they had stocked and repaired, the children moving in the middle distance, the animals, the work, the evidence.

And through one narrow gap in the trees to the northeast, when the season and light aligned just right, there was a sliver of Green Bay.

Only in midsummer.

Only for a few weeks, maybe.

A cut in the woods opened onto distance, and if the long evening sun came through at the right angle, the water flashed. A glimmer. A secret piece of the Bay visible from the back porch only when the geometry of the world permitted it.

The rest of the year the trees closed again.

I love that detail now.

It feels almost too symbolic, but childhood memory often preserves symbols before we know they are symbols.

Their love was like that too, maybe.

Not always visible.

Not theatrical.

But when the angle was right, it flashed.

I never joined them there. I did not understand the ritual. I was still too much a boy, full of motion and dirt and tree-climbing, interested in the world as something to run through, not something to sit quietly and behold.

But I understand it now.

The small porch was their pause inside the world they had made.

My mother had dreamed much of that life into being. My father had built so much of it with his hands. Together they had made a farmette, a family, a place. Their marriage was not separate from that creation. It was embedded in it. The barn, the garden, the chickens, the porch, the children in the yard — all of it was part of the life they had chosen and then labored into form.

And at the end of the day, they sat above it together.

Not triumphantly.

Not sentimentally.

Just there.

Two tired people with tea.

I imagine they talked about the day. School. Work. Money. Animals. The garden. Which machine was acting up. Which child needed what. Maybe they talked about me and Helen. Maybe they planned the next project, the next season, the next repair.

Or maybe sometimes they said very little.

Maybe the point was not conversation.

Maybe the point was sitting side by side long enough to remember they were on the same side.

That may be one of the quietest forms of marriage.

Returning to the same place after being pulled apart by the day.

Letting the work fall silent.

Watching the light leave.

I think my mother was the love of his life.

I believe that more strongly the older I get.

I could sense it as a child, though I would never have said it that way. I sensed it in the hand across the bench seat. In the kitchen laugh. In the way they seemed to face the same direction. And most of all, I sensed it on that porch.

The back porch taught me something about love before I knew I was being taught.

That love can be plain.

That it can be built into routines.

That it can look like two mugs of Lipton tea at sundown.

That it can live not in declarations, but in returning.

Two people, busy all day, finding each other again in the same six-foot square.

The screen door slamming behind them.

The chickens in the grass.

The children in the trees.

The Bay flashing briefly through the woods.

And then, slowly, going dark.