The first pumpkin of the year is sitting on our porch steps right now, and it is already a little soft on one side. I bought it at the Saturday market for four dollars, carried it home on my hip like a toddler, and set it down in a patch of afternoon sun that hit 86 degrees by three o'clock. Pepper sniffed it, decided it was not food, and went back to lying flat on the cool concrete by the door. That is October in Orangeburg. The calendar says fall. The thermometer is still thinking about it.
I used to find this frustrating. A few years into living in this old brick ranch, I have stopped waiting. Fall on a Southern porch is its own season, and it rewards a different kind of attention.
Small signals instead of big changes
Autumn here doesn't arrive all at once. It leaks in. The first sign is usually the light: by early October the sun comes in lower through the screens on the back porch, and the corner where Ben keeps his boots finally sits in shade by late afternoon. The second sign is the pecans. Our two big trees start dropping green husks onto the carport roof in the middle of the night, a sound like someone tapping a knuckle on a tin can, and Lila now considers it her job to collect the first ones in an old coffee can.
Then there is the morning air. Most days it is still sticky, but every so often we get one of those mornings where it is 64 degrees at seven and the humidity has backed off. On those mornings I take my coffee outside before anyone else is up, and the porch feels like a different room. I have learned to notice those days rather than expect them.
Decorating for the weather we actually have
Our porch is screened, which helps with mosquitoes but does nothing for heat. Anything I put out there has to survive warm afternoons and the occasional sideways rain. A few things that work for us:
- Gourds and small pumpkins in shade, not sun. The ones by the door rot within two weeks. The ones tucked under the bench last until Thanksgiving.
- Dried things from the yard. A bundle of pecan branches with a few leaves still on, some dried hydrangea heads from my neighbor's bush, and a handful of broom sedge from the edge of the lot. Free, and they look right because they are from here.
- Cotton instead of wool. I put away the summer cushion covers and bring out two rust-colored cotton ones I sewed from a thrifted tablecloth. Fall color, no extra warmth.
- A bowl of something to do. Right now it is the coffee can of pecans and a nutcracker. Lila and I crack a few after school while we talk about her day.
Total spent this year: the four-dollar pumpkin, three gourds at a dollar each, and a box of tea lights. Everything else came out of the shed or off the ground.
Keeping the house cool while the porch gets cozy
The porch is where we live in the evenings, but the house still has to stay comfortable. This is the first fall with the smart thermostat Ben and I installed in June, and I like that I can let the house drift up a couple of degrees in the afternoon while we are outside instead of cooling empty rooms. Our August bill came in at $221, which still makes me wince a little, but it is a long way from the $312 of the August before. Most of that difference came from the dull work of last year: the duct sealing, the attic insulation, the blackout curtains.
Our porch evening, roughly
- Supper inside around six, when it is still too warm to eat out.
- Dishes, then everyone migrates out with a drink. Iced tea for us, milk for Lila, a bowl of water for Pepper.
- Fan on, tea lights lit once the sun drops behind the pecans.
- Lila reads to us, or we listen to the frogs and the trains in the distance.
- Bath and bed around eight. Ben and I stay out another half hour if the mosquitoes allow it.
Waiting for the first real front
Sometime in the next few weeks a cold front will push through. We will feel it in the evening first, a wind that turns the pecan leaves over so their pale undersides show, and then the next morning will be crisp in a way that makes everyone in town a little giddy. I will dig out the one wool throw, make a pot of chili even though it will be warm again by Friday, and Lila will insist on wearing her new jacket to school.
Until then, the porch is enough. The soft pumpkin, the cracked pecans, the fan turning above us. I have stopped thinking of this stretch as fall that hasn't arrived yet. It is just our version of it, warm and slow, with the light getting a little more golden every week.
