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By Sean Dietrich

I come from a long line of porch sitters. This is why I am always on my porch. In my neighborhood, I am affectionately known as “that weirdo freak who’s always on his porch.” This is usually said in a positive way.

But I can’t help it. Since infanthood, the only place I ever wanted to be was a porch. There I’d be, wearing my onesie, crawling on the porch, drooling on myself, and testing the maximum capacity limits of my diaper. Whenever my mother’s friends visited, they would pick me up to take me inside and I would start crying. They would return me to the floorboards and say, “There’s something wrong with Sue’s baby.”

People would continue saying this for many years thereafter.

My current porch is a modest but peaceful place. You can hear far-off trains passing through Birmingham, or listen to neighborhood dogs communicating via International Bark Telegraph.

We have a haint blue porch ceiling. Rocking chairs. The hanging ferns on my porch are my favorite.

We have eight ferns in total. They are healthy and lush because my wife makes me place them in the yard, one by one, whenever it’s about to rain. This is because my wife sincerely believes rainwater is better than hosepipe water, which is an old wives’ tale, of course.

Just like the wives’ tale that says children can’t swim for an hour after they eat lunch or they’ll drown, which is scientifically proven to be false. For decades, however, due to this misinformation, millions of young Americans missed countless carefree swimming hours, whilst their mothers caught up on the latest installment of “Days of Our Lives.”

I often begin my porch-sitting early, before sunup. I see the whole day begin.

The birds start about 5 a.m., in preparation for sunrise — which is a pretty big deal in Bird World. The birds get louder and louder. Soon, the whole earth has become a bird sanctuary, and they’re all celebrating dawn.

No two bird calls are the same. There are chirps, twitters, warbles, hollers, screeches, cries, hoots, cheeps, caws, whistles, chatters, bellowing, croaking, trilling, buzzing, whipoorwilling, clicking, peeping, chattering and chick-a-deeing. You can get lost in all the bird noise you hear on my porch.

I don’t know when we quit building front porches. Once upon a time, every house had one. People would sit outside to count cars and wave at neighbors. Today, we have back decks. Nobody counts cars anymore. Even fewer wave.

But then, a lot has changed since olden days. One hundred years ago, America had sidewalks. Today we have a staggering 80 percent fewer sidewalks. At one time in history, 70-some percent of American schoolchildren rode bikes. Today, that number is getting close to single digits.

We used to have newspapers, magazines and comic books. Today, we have phones. Once upon a time in America, nearly 80 percent of Americans — even young professionals — admitted to occasionally taking daily naps. Now, only 17 percent of Americans nap.

But when you sit on your front porch, you fall back in time. You see neighborhood cats. Ferns. Birds. If you’re lucky, you might even drift off to sleep for a minute.

When you wake up, you’ll realize that even though things are different than they were a hundred years ago, life is still good.

People are still wonderfully insane. Kids still ride bikes — somewhere in America. Naps still happen, people are just too proud to admit it. People still greet their neighbors. Birds still sing.

And something is still definitely wrong with Sue’s baby.

(Sean Dietrich is a columnist, humorist, multi-instrumentalist and stand-up storyteller known for his commentary on life in the American South. His work has appeared in Newsweek, Southern Living, Reader’s Digest, Garden and Gun, and his column appears weekly in newspapers throughout the U.S.)