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Serial #0119

Good Bones Porch Meditation

During the year 1908, while the Hostutler family lived in their barn, they built a wood frame house. Just west of Willow Creek in Lipscomb County, Texas the small house is built with quality grade lumber—southern longleaf throughout. A porch with redwood turned posts wraps around two sides of the house.

In later years with an expanding family, the Hostutlers enclosed and screened the west stretch of porch for a sleeping room. Still later when indoor plumbing came along, a small bathroom was added at the end of the porch.

Long vacant by the time salvaging starts, the porch is well on its way to weathering down. No pry bar is needed to remove the first short piece of car siding from the enclosed porch section. I have to step back. An almost spectral sight greets me. Like a long-hidden bone, the corner porch post shines behind the gray skin of siding. Some competent past carpenter has even scribed a board to fit the post beading to limit the mouse runs in the wall.

The memory of the hidden post stays with me. I wonder how to do justice to the porch secret. An old black screen door finally brings it all together. The screen door hung on Grandma Bucher’s back porch. When we tore the old house down in 1978, we recycled part of the wood into a new chicken house. The screen door became the door between the brooder and laying rooms. Twenty-two years later we no longer have chickens, so the chicken house is the tool shed and the black screen door isn’t about to head to the dump. The Good Bones Porch Meditation is on its way. Crown molding and some crackled interior trim from the Hostutler house joins with interior trim from a homestead north of Mobeetie and another house east of Sunray. Short turned posts from a demolished house down in Austin are now at home with eave brackets from an Ellis County, Oklahoma house and green spindles from the porch screen on Tom Conatser’s house north of the Canadian River.

Family and friends in front of their respective porches and houses grace the door panels of the Good Bones Porch Meditation.

(another view below)