Porch

The porch of the old Bryan house, nigh on two hundred years old, stands steadfast, its original timbers and planks worn smooth as a whispered prayer, bearing the weight of all who’ve lingered there. It’s a place that’s known time’s slow, heavy tread, needing little to hold its truth—only a few rail pickets, splintered by vandals in some fleeting rage, were traded for new. The vinyl siding, a brash modern veil, was stripped away, revealing wood that sighed under the open sky, scraped clean and touched anew with paint. Here and there, the roof’s fascia had crumbled to rot, like memories too long held, and the columns, proud but worn, asked for a careful hand to mend their scars.

Yet this porch, for all its quiet endurance, carries a deeper story in its grain. Slaves once stood here, their bare feet soft on these same boards, their voices low, perhaps, or silent, under the weight of their bondage. Masters, too, strode across this space, their boots heavy with authority, their eyes blind to the lives bound to their will. The porch held them all—men and women whose names the years have half-forgotten, their joys and sorrows woven into the wood’s own pulse. It stood witness to their comings and goings, to the sharp divide of their worlds, and still it stands, murmuring of those long-ago evenings when the air was thick with unspoken things, and the Houston County dusk fell soft as a sigh.