The Porch Light, and the Ten Minutes After Dark

Every porch light is a small lighthouse, and it brings in exactly what a lighthouse is meant to keep away.

The stop

I take the porch last on the daylight part of the walk, because the porch only tells the truth after dark. In the afternoon this one looked fine: a lantern beside the door, a screen door, two chairs, a mat. At nine I came back and the lantern had a halo of moths and midges around it, the glass was crusted with the ones from previous nights, and a web the width of my palm ran from the fixture to the door frame, built by a spider who had understood the arrangement long before the owner did.

Flying insects are drawn to light, and the cooler and bluer the light, the more of them come. Spiders follow the insects. Geckos and larger things follow the spiders, if the climate allows. And a screen door with a tear at the bottom corner, which this one had, turns the whole gathering into an indoor event the moment the main door opens. The lantern was mounted directly beside the door, which is the worst place for it; every time the door opened, the crowd was already at the threshold.

Here the work is light. The bulb gets swapped for a warm-toned one, since the yellow end of the spectrum draws noticeably fewer of them than the cold white that had been in there. Where the owner agrees, the fixture is moved a few feet along the wall so the light reaches the door without sitting on it. The screen gets patched, the web and the old insect crust get cleared, and the door sweep gets replaced so the gap at the bottom of the main door closes. No station here; a porch is not a feeding site, it is a lobby.

The note

While I was on the stepladder at the lantern, the owner came out and sat in one of the chairs with a coffee he was not going to finish, and we talked. He said the porch was the only place he sat that did not have a screen in front of him. Not the insect kind; the glowing kind. Inside, every chair faced a television or had a phone on the arm of it. Out here, with the bulb changed, there was the street, the dark and the sound of whatever was in the trees.

I have no training in the body and I will not pretend to. But I have been on a lot of porches at nine at night, and I will record what I see: the men who sit outside for a little while after dark seem to go to bed differently from the ones who go from a bright screen straight to a dark room. Research has looked at how much bright light in the last hour of the evening pushes the body's sense of the hour later, and the dim end of the porch seems to be on the right side of it. Some men notice that ten minutes out there does what an hour on the couch does not.

The habit is the chair. Keep one on the porch, facing the street rather than the door. After dinner, once the kitchen is closed, go out and sit in it for ten minutes with nothing in your hands but the coffee or nothing at all. Leave the phone inside, on purpose, where you can hear it ring if it must. Keep the porch light warm and low, or off if the street is lit. When the ten minutes are up, go in and start the last part of the evening with the house already dimmer than the porch was.

The lantern was mine and the screen was mine. The chair was already his. The only thing I added to it was the suggestion that it be used every night and not only on the night the pest man came.