The Chair on My Mother’s Sun Porch

Mom’s Porch

My mother, Lois, is seventy-four. She lives six blocks from Main in the house I grew up in, a story-and-a-half with white siding and a big enclosed sun porch on the south side that my grandpa built in 1961.

That porch has windows on three sides, the old kind that crank out. It has its own door to the outside, at the top of three concrete steps on the driveway side, and an inside door into the back hall by the half bath. Mom grows geraniums out there all winter and does her crossword in the afternoon sun.

I went over that Thursday to tell her about Kendra. She was making bars for circle, the chocolate chip ones with the butterscotch, and she listened to the whole thing with the spatula in her hand.

When I finished, she set the spatula down and looked past me, through the kitchen doorway and down the hall to the porch.

“That porch has a door of its own,” she said. “Your grandpa put it in so Grandma could hang wash without tracking through my kitchen.”

“Mom, you can’t have a beauty shop on your porch.” She just looked at me and asked why not.

I opened my mouth, and I did not have an answer except that the state had rules. So that night I looked them up.

In South Dakota you cannot just cut hair in your house. The state cosmetology commission licenses salons, and a salon in a home has to meet the same rules as one on Main Street, plus a few more.

It needs its own entrance from outside and a door that closes the shop off from the house. It needs a shampoo sink with hot and cold water, a restroom the clients can reach without walking through the bedrooms, clean and dirty towel storage, a way to disinfect tools, and an inspection before you open.

I read it all twice. Then I looked at Mom’s porch in my head, room by room.

The outside door was there. The inside door to the back hall closed and had a lock. The half bath was ten feet down that same hall, past nothing but the coat hooks and the deep freeze.

The only thing missing was the sink.