The Porch I Swept for My Neighbor

What I got out of it

I would like to tell you I did this only for him. That would be a lie, and I don’t tell them, and I am too old to start.

The truth is that I had stopped cooking. For four years I had eaten toast and cheese sandwiches standing at the counter, and I had told myself it was foolish to cook for one.

And then I started cooking for a man across the yard, and I cooked for myself too, because it was just as easy to make two plates as one. I sat down at my table by the window with a hot meal, and Clifton’s kitchen light came on across the grass, and for the first time in four years I felt like I was eating supper with another living person.

That is what no one tells you about kindness. You think you are the one giving, and some mornings you honestly are. But mostly you are standing at somebody else’s door being given a reason to get up.

On the thirtieth day, the plate came back different.

I was on my steps, the broom under my arm, and I saw the glint of glass on the rail where the white plate was supposed to be. I crossed the yard and found the plate right where it always was, washed and dried, with the second plate on top.

And in the middle of it sat a pint jar of peach preserves.

The lid had been wiped clean. On the lid, in blue ballpoint, in a small round hand that I would have known anywhere, was written:

“Peach, Aug. Roz B.”

It was her handwriting. It was last August. She had canned it with her own hands, in her own kitchen, in the last month of her life.

I stood on that porch in the cold, holding that jar, and my eyes stung, and I could not tell you for a good while how long I stood there.

I understood that I had been given the one thing in that house he could not stand to open. And he had put it in my hands.

I did not eat it for a week. When I finally did, I spread it on a biscuit at the table by the window, and it tasted like August, and I cried into it, which Vernon would have called a waste of good preserves.