Who keeps this journal

I was born in North Carolina and I never got far from it. My husband and I raised our children here, and now there are grandchildren who come through the screen door without knocking and leave it swinging. Most mornings I'm out on the porch with a cup of coffee before the rest of the house is up, and that first hour is where nearly everything on this site gets written.

For about twenty years I worked as an in home caregiver. That means I let myself into other people's houses in the morning, sometimes with a key from under a flowerpot, and helped somebody sit up, get washed, get a little breakfast down, and get started on the day. I want to be plain about what that was and what it wasn't. I am not a nurse and I never was. I did not treat anybody and I did not diagnose anybody. I helped people stay in their own homes, and I sat in a great many kitchens.

My daddy, and the stairs

My daddy smoked most of his life. He started young, back when just about everybody did, and he tried to quit more times than I can count. He never could, God bless him, and he really did try. Year after year I watched the stairs in our house get longer for him. He would stop halfway up and make a show of hunting for something in his pocket. He never once complained. That was the part that frightened me, because if he was not going to say it out loud, somebody in that house had to learn how to see it.

The hardest chair in the house

Then, in nearly every house I ever worked in, there was a second person. A wife. A grown daughter. A husband who had not slept properly in two years. They stood in the doorway while I worked, and when I was leaving they walked me out to my car to say the thing they would not say inside that house. It was always some version of the same sentence. I'm so tired, and I don't know what else to do.

The hardest chair in the house isn't the one the sick person sits in. It's the one right next to it. Nobody ever asks the person in that chair how she is holding up. That is most of the reason there is a journal here at all.

What I publish, and how often

The Porchlight Journal is plain notes on breathing easy, on keeping your independence as the years go, and on the people carrying the load of the caring. What I noticed in ordinary houses over twenty years. What seemed to help. What is worth a phone call to somebody who went to school for it. I write it the way I would say it over the fence, because that is how I talk.

There is no schedule worth the name. A new entry goes up when I have one worth your time, which comes out to about once or twice a month. If a month goes by and nothing appears, it is because I had nothing honest to add, and I would rather leave the page alone than pad it out.

I'm one woman at a kitchen table. Nothing on these journal pages is for sale, there is no newsletter, and no advertisement runs inside the writing. How the site is paid for is set out in the Terms of Use, in plain words. If you write to me, you get me, usually a week or two later.