The magical in-betweenness—and surprising history—of the porch. By David Owen  Summers in Kansas City in the nineteen-thirties were so hot that my mother’s father moved his bed into the porch, which opened off the living room and was screened on three sides. My grandmother spent many hours there, too, mostly reading in a big wicker chair between a card table and a floor lamp. The house I grew up in also had a screened porch, which my parents added when I was eleven. That house had primitive central air-conditioning, installed by a previous owner, but running it was so expensive that my mother could seldom persuade my father to turn it on. In hot weather, the porch became our family room, dining room, playroom, and party room, and when I was in high school my girlfriend and I sometimes took my mother’s little black-and-white kitchen TV out there and turned up the volume so that we could hear “M*A*S*H” or “Love, American Style” above the droning of what seemed to be millions of cicadas. My own house, in Connecticut, has two porches, one screened and one not. The screened one is a great place to read on summer evenings. I once looked up from “Bleak House” and saw two black bears walking by, thirty or forty feet away. They looked less like bears than like men wearing bear suits. | 
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