The Best Kind of Friend

A great joy for me as a young girl was sitting with my neighbors on their porch swings. Mrs. Keith lived across the road from our house. According to my calculation, at that time she had the biggest front yard in Curryville with the largest trees. When I saw her on her porch, I would often join her.

Mrs. Keith liked to explain what was happening with the trees. She understood the changing of colors. She told me that the tree did not wait until spring for the leaves to form. She said that the fall already sets the buds ready for the spring. The baby leaves are protected inside the bud, resting through the winter, waiting for spring. That is a very clever thing for the tree to do.

Her sister often joined us on the swing. That gave us enough noise power to clap our hands and watch the birds fly. That was my favorite thing to do with them.

Sometimes, Mrs. Keith didn’t want talking. Her gentle pat on my hand or arm was a signal to just sit there and listen to the trees.

“The best kind of friend is the kind you can sit on a porch swing with, never say a word, then walk away feeling like it was the best conversation that you ever had.”

Our front porch did not have a swing, but it was one of our playgrounds. One of our porch games was to make up a scenario for one of us about the next car that would come by. Maybe it would be the first car one of us would buy or the car that we would take on our honeymoon. Now, Curryville traffic was slim, so the wait could be long. Sometimes the next vehicle would be a tractor and we would laugh and laugh as though the scenario was a truth.

If we thought of something for a good laugh, the porch was our stage. We were good at dressing up and making our own costumes. The porch was where mother took pictures because she needed light for that Brownie Hawkeye camera to capture her memory.

The porch was where we looked every morning for our bottle of milk. Sometimes in the winter the milk would freeze. The cardboard cap would push up to expose one of the best tasting things in the whole world... frozen cream.