A tale of two balconies, separated by a lifetime of living and memories in Daydreaming on the Porch

I never had a house that was my own. For almost my whole life I have rented apartments and have been quite content with that. Although I am a porch person by sentiment and nature, I only once lived in a house that had a porch and that was for ten years at my mother’s home when I was taking care of her when she declined over years from diabetes and dementia. I did love her side garden front porch with a nice rocking chair where I sat for countless hours contemplating my life and the mysteries of the universe, as I feebly tried to know them better. Porches and balconies are where I spent my time outdoors, for the most part,and apartments have balconies on the second floor and higher, and two apartment balconies are the subject of this essay.

Balconies are almost always smaller than porches, but I always managed to squeeze in some sort of chair or rocker to sit in plus a few potted plants. Nothing elaborate.

My first apartment during my senior year of college in 1972 had a small porch was actually a slightly elevated balcony in a wood-frame duplex in the Gentilly section of New Orleans. It had iron railings, was narrow and only about ten feet long, but it was my very own first porch.

Here is a section of a journal entry about that apartment and porch written 25 years ago:

When I came home from classes, I walked up the front steps, through the screen door into the sanctuary that was my first apartment. How I loved that place, beat-up furniture and all. I can hear distinctly, even now, the big kitchen window fan as I turned it on, and cool air was drawn through open windows in the bedoom, down the hall to the kitchen. And I would sit at a formica table and start thinking of the suppper I was going to fix, the novel I was going to be reading later that evening, and, the inviting front porch where I would sit outside about 9 or 10 most nice nights and gaze at the stars over Gentilly Boulevard and dream of the future…

I can only look back now decades later and marvel inwardly at what that porch and apartment meant to me. Essentially, it was where my life as an adult began. When you are 20 there is no actual sense of time. I knew that my entire future was ahead of me. There seemed to be no limitations. Life spread out before me in an endless series of future days, future jobs and friends, and future turmoil and drama in the vast unknown that lay ahead.

Flash forward to the Fall of 1978, only seven years later, but an eternity of exuberantly living life and experiencing early adulthood and the beginning of my chosen career in newspaper print journalism. I had jobs I enjoyed and looked forward to each day, friends, and life was good, for the most part until the problems I had always ignored as best I could, or at least suppressed, came crashing down on me resulting in the loss of everything I had cherished.

In the Sunmer of 1979 I returned to Columbia after spending a few months at my childhood home recuperating from depression, returning to exactly where I had started out in 1973. I tried and succeeded in temporarily rebuilding my life and regaining a miraculous degree of hope and excitement, but also nervous anticipation about starting over and reconnecting with the friends I had become close to.

The first thing I did after getting a job at the university was to find an apartment. And that would have to be a special place that would enable me to peacefully unwind after a day at work or taking grad school classes,which I immediately started doing. I needed a sanctuary after all I had endured the previous year.

I was very fortunate, with the help of a friend, to find an apartment complex on the eastern outskirts of Columbia. The apartments were nondescript and had absolutely no aesthetic appeal. It was one of those typical complexes from the 1970s with no trees or attractive plantings within the confines of the space.

But what made this place magical was the particular 2-bedroom unit I rented, which just happened to be in the perfect location at the far end of the complex, bordered on the front and side by a quiet patch of woodland filled with hickory and oak trees. It was totally quiet there. On summer nights the woods came alive with the mesmerizing sounds of frogs, crickets,and other insects, rhythmically droning and reaching high and low crescendos of sound. I had never heard any Nature sounds as rich and melodious. On some nights in summer when it wasn’t too hot, I’d open the window in my bedroom and rest in my plush, cordiroy covered recliner chair, blissed out and lost in thought and contemplation in a world quite apart from my ordinary reality. I also wrote long journal entries of a spiritual nature in that comfortable chair.

Now for the balcony. I was in a second-floor apartment and a spacious balcony opened up as I parted the sliding glass doors. I had a modest aluminum folding chair, the kind you bring out to the beach to sit in. Before me were nothing but woods. And in Autumn during each of the four Novembers I spent there, the dozen or so tall hickory trees turned a shade of yellow-gold of such depth of color as I had never seen before. This lasted a couple of weeks and always entranced me as I sat on the balcony relaxing and thinking of so many things. I truly felt I was way out in the country. It was that quiet there.

Often when I sat out on that balcony I glanced at a narrow path through the woods that extended about 200 feet until it opened out to railroad tracks on a gravel bed. I sometimes walked on those tracks for a few hundred or more feet, then eased down the gravel slope to the edge of the woods, which I entered and once found a tiny spring-fed stream quietly, musically flowing along on rocks and under fallen tree trunks. When I first heard the trickling stream I could not believe it at first. It was so beautiful and calming to my spirit. I wrote about it in my journal many years ago.

The stream – Open Diary

https://www.opendiary.com/m/oswego/the-stream-2-1237089/

Sad to have to say, but that idyllic apartment beside the woods in East Columbia is nothing like it was, for a simple reason. As far as I know it’s still there, but a few years after I moved, the long-planned beltway extension of the Interstate came through just a couple of hundred yards from that same window where I relaxed in my recliner chair and delighted in those calming night sounds. The one time I revisited the place, all I could hear were trucks and cars whizzing by on that infernal but necessary highway. Necessary for “progress,” that is. But to me the apartment, though recognizable, might as well have been gone forever.

It’s now almost 5 am on October 29, 2024. I just came in from my 4th floor balcony where I have my favorite rocking chair brought with me during the move from my mother’s house downtown two years ago. The pandemic delayed the sale of the house, but by 2021 I was able rent this cozy 1-bedroom apartment surrounded on two sides by live oak woodlands, a tidal creek and marsh. (Does there seem to be a pattern here?) It’s the perfect place for me, and I have a feeling this will be my final dwelling place. I am enjoying the surroundings and Charleston’s architectural and and natural beauty to the fullest, seven years after I retired from my job as a librarian.

Hard to imagine, but at 73 it’s been 40 years since I enjoyed my Columbia balcony. My current apartment balcony will be where the curtain on the play of my life closes for a final time. Countless late nights since I’ve moved here have found me in my rocking chair on the balcony, small fan soothingly keeping me cool in summer. There were night clouds to look at this evening/morning, and the planet Venus was especially bright and visible. As I looked into the sky, I tried to imagine what it would look like deep in he country where thousands of stars would b visible. In the city that’s not to be, but I can imagine. Every month or so I I look at a full or near-full moon, sometimes obscured briefly by stray clouds. I’m there waiting to take a photo as the moon re-appears out of the clouds. This is often between 2 and 4 am, not long before I finally get to bed.

This balcony lets me step outside any time of day or night and get some fresh air, look up at clouds, and if there’s a bit of breeze, listen to my two wind chimes. I love those sounds. Also, I leave my phone inside and do nothing but relax and think, and let memories float in and out of consciousness. But during this time of contemplation, I occasionally am bombarded suddenly by flashbacks to traumatic events. I can’t do anything to prevent this. I take it for what it is. Those bad experiences are long in my past, but somehow, in having those flashbacks I am called pin to perhaps learn some new lesson from my past. But most memories are of loved ones, friends, and pleasant and happy times retracing or reliving my brief years teaching and working at newspaper. When daily life is going fairly smoothly and not stressful, I feel I have the time to reminisce about growing up, school days, college and my first jobs, my entire past, actually. I think most people do this in old age. .

I love sitting on my balcony in the middle of the night when there are no sounds but the songs of night insects and frogs in summer, and general stillness in colder weather. I wish it would snow sometime in January and I could watch it from my balcony.

I think often of my mother when I’m sitting on the balcony. I recall little events and special times together during the years I took care of her before she passed away at 96 in 2020, her struggles with dementia and diabetes over.

Everything seems to come full circle. My Columbia balcony holds memories of teaching and friends and growing spiritually, when I was still a young man of 28. My apartment and balcony now, which I consider my home place, is where I go to recall and review the past, and the day just ended. Youth and old age. And now, hope, mystery and beauty, and summing it all up in the final, still novel years of elderhood.

Th same framed print from my early 80s apartment hanging in an identical place on the wall of my bedroom in 2024:
https://imgur.com/a/KE88TVr