What this world needs...

If you want to know how people lived in the past, you don’t turn to art, you look at fashion and architecture. I was reminded of that by this meme going around the Internet:

The wide porch or verandah was a common sight in the American South, and in colonial structures in places like India, Africa and Australia. These are all places that get right hot in the summertime, and a covered porch was a place where residents could sit in the shade, catch any cross-breezes stirring at all, and take it easy.

A secondary benefit was that they were typically constructed at the front of the house, so the residents faced out into the neighborhood, and they and passers-by could commit acts of sociability with some frequency.

In the South, things slowed down in the summer months. You wore lighter clothes. You took longer breaks. You drank cool beverages poured from glass pitchers into tall glasses. You weren’t expected to exert top effort at the office, where windows were opened, creaky fans blew air around, and there was an actual use for paperweights.

Yeah, the penny only dropped for me within the past couple of years. As a kid, I recall paperweights in “gift” shops, but only ever seeing them on people’s shelves. As far as I could tell, they were just something you stuck on mantels and the like, tschatschkes like glass animals or souvenir spoons; things that you had to dust.

But take a look at this 1943 office in the Department of the Interior, and imagine July and August, with the windows open and fans cranked up to the max. Your glass ashtray wouldn’t have been enough to keep all the stacks of paper on your desk from flying around.

And at quitting time, you’d have left that office, maybe had supper in the dining room, but then you’d have repaired with the family to the porch, to sit through the evening until it was time to go to bed. In the South, the porch or a portion of it might have been screened, because insects. But you’d still have spent a good part of your life out there. And as neighbors strolled past, you’d invite them up for a glass of iced tea or lemonade, and you’d have caught up on all the gossip.

We had a front porch in the house where I grew up.

It was in Southern California, so not quite the heat factor as in Mobile or Atlanta. But it was on a quiet street, and the kids of multiple families used to play games in one or another front yard (or—truth be told—in the street), while the parents would sit on the porch and talk about whatever parents talked about. It seems like another planet now.

(And can I just say that the current residents clearly don't use the front yard for anything, and obviously don't make much use of a lawn mower or the sprinkler system. Someone's taken out all the camellias and let the crepe myrtle go ballistic. But whatever.)

Air conditioning changed all that. It’s a tremendous boon, I am here to tell you. But you can chart the point at which AC changed attitudes toward both work and play here in the South. Office windows stayed closed (and then sealed) all year long, and full effort was expected whether it was January or July.

And houses lost those front-facing porches, swapped out for two- or three-car garages in places of prominence, with decks on the back, where individual families could engage in activities as small units. (Having the most eye-grabbing part of your house be where you park your cars tells you a lot about priorities.) You’d have to be invited to come over and have a chat or a drink.

And nowadays, of course, it wouldn’t matter where you are—front porch, back deck, living room, dining room or bathroom—each individual person would have his/her shoulders hunched over a mobile device, fully engaged with people not in front of them, whether personally known or characters in a game or scripted show. You see it when groups of people (whether families or friends) gather in restaurants: each with his/her own device, barely looking up to order or receive the food.

So it’ll take more than a meme to get people to interact in the way they did pre-60s, when sitting down with your neighbors was the best defense against nature’s idea of a summer. But it’s a nice thought.