Retrospect: porch vs patio

Self-tutoring about people and events from the past: the tutor mentions an interesting story.

Grade 2: reading a story in class. We were taking turns reading sentences.

Josephine and her dog were on the porch, began on of my classmates.

Anyone paying half attention could tell the word on the page (we all had our readers opened to the same page) didn’t say porch. It said patio, but no-one knew that word. Porch made sense, since it was the outdoor setting kids knew that starts with p.

The teacher asked several different kids what that word was: they each said porch. In the rural Maritimes, back then, none of us had seen a patio. However, everyone knew a few houses that had porches.

This was 1978, long before ordinary people had access to the Internet. There wasn’t even a computer in the room – or even the school, so far as I knew.

The teacher tried to explain to us what a patio is, but of course she failed, since, with something like that, seeing is believing. We all learned to say patio, just admitting to ourselves it didn’t exist but we were supposed to pretend.

Out west, patios were more common, even back then, from my understanding. Porches, inversely, were much rarer. Anyway, it would be about seven years before I would see a patio, for real, in Victoria, BC. I’ll admit, it was just as the teacher had described, even though it was impossible to believe in PEI in 1979.