Porch Guitar

I wasn’t just a kid with imagination — I was a kid with a certain blue plastic bin that had already lived a full life before I ever turned it into a musical instrument.

Not a big bin. Not a storage tote. A 12x5 childhood toy bin — the kind with the two little oval hand holes on the sides and a lid that used to snap on with those white push tabs. The kind every 90s kid had in at least two colors. (I remember having 3 - blue, pink, teal.)

My parents kept my toy cars in the pink one. The blue one? That was my destiny.

By the time I was plucking rubber bands across the top like a porch‑front prodigy, the lid was still miraculously intact. It survived my entire childhood. It survived my teens. It survived my twenties. It survived moves, purges, reorganizations, and the general entropy of life.

And then — somewhere in my thirties — it vanished. Just… gone. Like it finally said, “I’ve done enough. I’ve seen enough. I’ve held enough of this woman’s chaos. I’m retiring.”

But I digress.

With my Porch Guitar, I’d stretch rubber bands across the top, but I didn’t stop there. No. I was a visionary.

Sometimes I’d wedge sticks or random objects under the bands to create “tension” and “range,” even though I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. To the naked eye, it was just a child plucking rubber bands on a plastic bin.

But to me?

It was a harp. A lyre. A mother‑floofing guitar.

And yes — in my head, it could ONLY be a guitar. I refused to call it anything else.

I’d sit behind the porch railposts, slightly hidden, offering my mysterious, alluring, rubber‑band‑based melodies to the neighborhood like some kind of feral siren.

Every passerby — dog walkers, joggers, mail retrievers — in my mind, they were all deeply impressed. I’d nod at them like, Yes. I know. You’re welcome for this concert.

Looking back, the signs were everywhere.

The girl who would one day sing “My Heart Will Go On” in a Cleopatra wig and vintage wedding dress. On stage. In my friend’s backyard. Where the stage was a porch. Where his angelic mom and sisters witnessed my… expression. With joy.

The poor neighbors