Reflections

By Christie Vilsack

2005

From my wicker chair on the east porch of Terrace Hill, I can see construction on Martin Luther King Drive and the tops of the Principal and Ruan buildings downtown. On balmy Sunday afternoons, Tom and I take our dog, Rosie, to the porch with a pitcher of iced tea and a couple of good books. We watch the squirrels play tag around the towering walnut trees, fattening themselves on walnut meats for a long winter. Sometimes we take our laptops and work side by side quietly, wondering which of us will doze off first.

From here, we have watched fireworks and fireflies. The flag flaps in a stiff wind high above us and water trickles from the historic fountain. In the distance, freight cars bump and screech as they switch tracks.

Sunday is the only day the porch is private. Twenty thousand guests visit Terrace Hill each year, and the east porch is part of the tour. One day in early July this past year, I settled into my favorite chair on the east porch with my laptop to write a speech I would deliver at the Democratic Convention. I thought the afternoon tours were over. I was deep in thought when the porch door opened and out came a tour guide and a busload of ladies from Dubuque. They were delighted to find me there in shorts, with hair tousled and no makeup.

“Oh, can I take your picture?” one of them asked, then snapped the photo before I had time to answer. Everyone else who brought a camera snapped a photo also.

We can easily entertain 50 or more people on the porch. Two years ago, we hosted my high school classmates during our 30-year reunion. State Fair Board spouses came for lunch one day. We have served friends leisurely dinners on the porch and welcomed foreign dignitaries, such as Governor and Mrs. Amano from Yamanashi, Japan. Novelist Dow Mossman drank iced tea there last summer, and we lit birthday candles for Jess one warm summer evening.

My first porch guests in 1999 were a group of volunteers from the local carpenters union who built a maze from hay bales for our first family literacy day.

Imagine guests in the late 1800s alighting from horse-drawn carriages at the carriage block at the end of the walk and proceeding up the porch steps to enter through the east door.

Originally, guests could walk out the sitting room windows onto the porch. The sitting room gib window appears to be normal, but it is constructed to fit into a hidden pocket so that the window opens to a height that allows people to freely walk in and out of the window onto the porch. This creates the illusion of bringing the outdoors in and the indoors out.

Anne Thorne Weaver, who lived here briefly as a child, tells a great porch story. She found out early in life that the porch at Terrace Hill is not always a private space.

When she was three years old, she and her mother came to live at Terrace Hill with her grandparents, Grover and Anna Hubbell. One summer afternoon, she was very hot, so she took off her clothes and went running outside to play in the little fountain with the statue of a child holding a bird aloft.

Thats how she discovered that her grandparents were entertaining. Among the guests was the First Lady of the United States Eleanor Roosevelt. As I sit on my porch composing these lines, I can just imagine it

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