We disuss this piled in family time.  Time with families.

We plan, we mothers directors of the play, contemplating our moves of time, like pieces of chess.

And we lift up this pilgrimmage to the porch where memories of babies and children and heart talks seep into the boards like the battleship gray stain.

Life is marked here.  This porch.  This memory repository for us.

Why do we long to go there.  What is this siren’s song calling us to come.  The breeze off the waterway calms and soothes and rustles up the past.  It stirs the heart to release here in this place.  Dump burden, dump worry here.  Its a sanctuary for pain.

Is it the sleeping porch knows how to rest the mind and the spirt.  Bibles stack here and start days here.

The palms billow like sails and whisper their rustling sound to the burdened soul, the tired soul.

She has seen weddings and witnessed crashing in of conversation.  This porch, like the matriarch tested through trials and tears.  She has wiped them, caught them.

We know to carve out time here, we momma planners.  We memory holders and keepers can tell stories of belly laughs, wicker rockers crazy rocking and generations piled up on laps while the world stopped here.  Stopped for us.  To catch up with ourselves.  To catch up with each other.  To fill the storehouses of life with story.

And we know that the giver of all good things, Father God, has more for us.  He always does.  So we carve out time and make time.  To start scavenger hunts here, to dye Easter Eggs with grown and semi-grown children.

Time to generation huddle.  To brush off the day in story.  The fish caught, the shells found, the sun burn worn like battle wounds of days battling the surf, the sea, the salt. The dinner bell rings and we feast on food and more.  We feast on life.

And we know as mommas that stories linger and die to be told.  The ones of love and life.  Dragonflies frenzied pace win the title of fastest moving creature as we linger.  And stars may fall or stars may stay pinned to the sky.  Either way we witness.

We pick story out of black dark night and early morning still.  We rockers and readers and dwellers in His word.

We launch boats into the sea with children here.  We welcome home the ones caught in the storms that blew in, from the sea, from this life.  We embrace them on the return.

The porch calls us to come here.

She calls to the weary to rest.

The joyful to celebrate.

The Glad of Heart to testify.

The discouraged to find encouragement,

The sea-seeker to delight in the salt of life.

We long for this respite place.  This stage set for living.  This place where laps are filled with friends or children, doubled up and rocking.

Where laps hold babies and bearded off-spring of the womb too.  The never too olds to call for mommas.

The laps hold promise and encouragement.  They hold tender touch of word and hand.

This porch for us says come to me.  And talk of Him.  And all He’s done.  And all He’ll do.

And bring your baskets, your eggs, your treasures.  But prepare your hearts for the more than they could ever hold.

Let’s go out to the porch this day.