Front Porch: It’s all about community, whether it’s stories about grads or friendly neighbors

I have a few unrelated items to share, so please forgive the hopping from topic to topic that follows.

First, I want to mention that in just over a month The Spokesman-Review will publish its annual graduation issue, which includes a feature on a graduating senior from each of the high schools in the newspaper’s circulation area.

Several of us who write for the newspaper are interviewing and writing those stories. The high schools submit a name of a student they select for this focus, and off we go. Quite often, I am moved by what they share about their lives.

This year is like so many of the previous years to which I’ve had the privilege of contributing. There is often a common theme: overcoming. So many – but not all, of course – have faced obstacles on the way to that diploma that no young person should ever have to.

They break your heart just as they uplift it as you see how they have prevailed. I hope you read their stories, especially if you tend to despair about “young people today.” Publication date is June 4.

On another note, I wrote recently about still using a write-on wall calendar and saving “good” cardboard boxes. It’s been interesting to hear that I’m not alone.

One man wrote that he still uses a write-on calendar even though he’s worked at programming computers for decades. A woman wrote that her family has moved many times and that saving those boxes has come in handy for everyone in the family. “Our adult daughter has moved to three apartments since we’ve been (in Spokane). She never paid for a moving box as we happily let her deplete our supply.”

And from another reader, the saddest of reasons, concerning her adult son, for no longer saving boxes for mailing purposes: “Now he is homeless in a tent in the Arizona desert and doesn’t even have a mailing address. So I cannot send him anything. Now as soon as I get an Amazon box, I fold it up and put it in the recycle bin.”

I wanted also to mention the recent death of Wayne Lawson, our next-door neighbor for more than 35 years. His wife, Marilyn, died last summer. We never formally socialized, as in having dinner at one anothers’ homes, but we had a lovely relationship just the same.

We’d watch over each others’ homes and take in the mail when someone was out of town. I’d get homemade cookies from Marilyn; they’d get homemade jam from me. We chatted, and we helped each other in assorted ways.

Wayne shoveled our driveway when Bruce and I were down with the flu. When Marilyn’s mother, who had Alzheimer’s, went missing, Wayne and Bruce were ready to head into the woods behind our houses to look for her, but at the last moment, Marilyn found her standing in a closet. When our youngest son was a young boy and taking singing lessons, Marilyn would have him over and accompany him on piano as he worked on learning a song.

For a 10-year period I wrote about a feral chicken who appeared in our neighborhood, and about her adventures after we relocated her. It was Marilyn and I who kept feed out and did what we could to help Miss Chicken survive her one year living wild in our neighborhood.

As families we stood on opposite sides of the political spectrum. Our various lawn signs during election season always canceled one another out. We knew where they stood, they knew where we stood. We didn’t much talk about that.

In being good neighbors, it didn’t matter.

Voices correspondent Stefanie Pettit can be reached by email at upwindsailor@comcast.net