Dear Readers, Used to be, in the morning, the top step of the front porch was the place to sit and await the arrival of Mr. Reed, the mailman, before it was time to get ready for afternoon kindergarten.
One could count the bees buzzing on the dandelions, the cars driving down River Ln., and the big kids riding their bikes to school.
In the evening, that same porch became the grown-ups’ domain; if there wasn’t enough room there for a swing, folding lawn chairs were fetched from the garage and placed in position, signaling that the front porch was open for visitors.
The front porch of the 1950s was the place to say “hello,” spread gossip, and solve the world’s problems. While our parents prattled on and on, we kids would run around the yards catching lightning bugs or engaging in boisterous games of Ghost Comes Out at Midnight.
Over the years, however, the front porch has evolved into an entirely different creature.
Today there are many young families living in my neighborhood, but I never see people on their front porches anymore, no kids in the morning, no adults in the evenings. If social visits happen at all these days, I assume they are by invitation only and take place on backyard patios or decks. Passers-by need to just keep passing by.
Oh, the front porch is still a gathering place of sorts, but instead of people congregating there, it’s packages. In fact, it’s a jungle of packages, an Amazon jungle.
Up and down the streets, in most every neighborhood, front porches are now piled high with brown cardboard boxes of every shape and size delivered by Amazon trucks. The drivers of these vehicles multi-task; they deliver packages and at the same time train for the ‘24 Summer Olympics. They speed down the street, stop suddenly in the middle of the road, jump out, and run full tilt hurling a package (or two or three) as they near field goal range of the front porch.
Dear Readers, do you shop online? Not me.
Seeing all those cardboard boxes makes me mourn for the millions of trees that gave their lives so the guy down the block could have an eight by two-inch tube of toothpaste delivered to his front porch in a three-foot cubed corrugated container.
Also, I worry about the potential identity theft and credit card fraud perpetrated upon online shoppers, especially on us seniors.
But mostly, I’m concerned about all the missing packages — and I’m not talking about Porch Pirates here! Despite the huge number of boxes that do end up on porches, there’s an even larger number that never reach the porch at all. Mysteriously, they disappear forever.
My husband, Dave, was one of the many who went overboard back in the pandemic and started shopping online much too much.
At first, it was only for essentials such as food, medicine, and chocolate chip cookies, but then it expanded to include extravagant non-essential items such as his latest purchase, three motorized kickboards for our grandsons to play with at the lake.
They never showed up. (The grandsons showed up, but the kickboards did not).
Four months of follow-up have thus far resulted in only one emailed response: “Please to stop contact us no more. We for surely gave package to your front porch on July 15 this yearly.”
People are missing from porches because of online shopping, and the same phenomena has also caused an absence of people in stores. I used to enjoy the occasional chit-chat with the person next to me at the Hallmark store or the person behind me in line at Macy’s.
No more. Everyone is shopping from home.
And so it goes. Albert Einstein once said, “The measure of intelligence is the ability to change.”
I like to think of myself as an intelligent person, so I must learn to embrace these changes, the new way of shopping, the new way of socializing.
Still, if you’re out for a stroll one of these lovely autumn evenings, please stop by my front porch; I’ll be sitting there in my lawn chair waiting for you to help solve the world’s problems, and perhaps to catch a few late-season lightning bugs.
Linda Kelly is a member of Blessed Sacrament Parish in Madison