I would love to watch a time-lapse film of the hill where we live from the day the first settler decided to farm its sunny southern slope to the present. I know our house was built in 1790, but what about the barns? Was a shelter for animals built first? Who cleared the land of trees, and whose poor back strained to build the five-foot by five-foot 300-foot long stone wall along the west side of the property? When did the crossing paths in the woods become the crossroads at the southwest corner of our dooryard? And who were the characters who cobbled together the various hodgepodge constructions that constitute our barns today. I have a lot of questions that a two-century fast-forward film would answer.

These questions arose for me as our back porch fell. Not of its own accord – though that day was near – but with the help of a couple of carpenter brothers who show up at our place periodically to keep things upright or, in this case, to pull them down when the cause is lost. The screened-in porch was the size of a living room. It was attached to the back of the house, I’d say sometime 40 or 50 years ago, and it sheltered innumerable summertime porch suppers over the decades. Its wobbly wooden underpinnings had rotted with the help of poor drainage behind the house, and it had to come down.  We replaced it with a much smaller and simpler open-air overhang that returned the house to its original profile and created a terrace for plants and people in the footprint of the old porch.