The difference between porch and stoop

I spend a lot of time on the stoop, watching the world go by. Sometimes I write about it. Sometimes, when I’m writing about it, I call the stoop the “porch.” So what’s the difference between porch and stoop? I’ve not consulted Google on the matter, so I could well be wrong, because as we all know, Google is the final arbiter in questions of what is fact and what is not. In my view, there’s no difference whatsoever, other than this. If you’re sitting on the porch, you live in town. If you’re sitting on the stoop, you’re in the country. I’m in the country. We’ve been having way too much rain lately, but unless there’s a robust wind blowing out of the south south-west, I avoid most of it on the stoop. One of the distractions when I’m focused on frogs and buzzards is the traffic on the road between the stoop and the marsh. Not that there’s a lot of it by city standards. A busy Sunday afternoon might see a few dozen cars go by. There’s people driving by where you can hear their car stereo from a mile down the road. I just think, how deafening must that be in the car? Then again, I remember a time when a loud stereo was considered really cool. In fact, when I was department manager for automotive at the K-Mart in the Stone Road Mall, big-ass car stereos were a big seller. That was just around the time the supposed “muscle car craze” of the late sixties morphed into the van craze of the early seventies. Suddenly a 426 hemi was last decade’s news, and a six-cylinder Econoline van was the happening thing. You had to admit the van had some advantages. Trying the oinky-boinky in a Dart GTS with bucket seats, console, and floor shifter wasn’t exactly an erotic experience, and the back seat wasn’t much of an improvement if boinker or boinkee were more than four feet tall. That’s the era when car stereos hit the big time. I recall a hitchhiking trip from Washington to Minnesota back in the van era. Somewhere in North Dakota a couple of long-hairs gave me a lift. They had the 24” woofers blasting Jerry and company full volume. They eventually pulled over to focus on the hash pipe and a lively discussion about whether sound waves could be harnessed to propel a vehicle. Fast forward fifty years, I’m sitting on the stoop here at Falling Downs, and I can hear the thumping bass of an approaching Land Rover that comes by about the same time every day. I figure these are the same bougie twats who muddied the waters on the porch/stoop debate by introducing the backyard “deck.” That was always just a thing that let you set down your drink on a hard surface instead of on the lawn. I’m sitting on the stoop.