"Several years back, I was visiting an elderly woman in my Quaker meeting. She was reminiscing about her childhood. I asked her what she missed the most. She closed her eyes a moment thinking back, then said, “Porch talk. I miss the porch talk.” Social scientists and preachers offer a number of reasons for the decline of civil society: broken homes, poverty, disease, television and increasing secularism, to name a few. I believe all that is wrong with our world can be attributed to the shortage of front porches and the talks we had on them. Somewhere around 1950, builders left off the front porch to save money, and we’ve had nothing but problems ever since."