Welcome to Phyllis Kester's front porch

Entertaining short stories written for adults and older children to serve as a bridge from an earlier generation to the present

My childhood summers would find my family gathered with neighbors and friends on the front porch to sing and socialize as our houses cooled off from the heat of the afternoon. Without air conditioning, we opened the windows to let the natural breezes cool our house so it would be more comfortable by bedtime. This was before television sets in every home and cellphones, so it was a time of outside neighborhood games like hide and seek or kick the can. It was also a precious season of visiting and story telling. I loved when relatives visited and told stories about my parents when they were young.

Scripture tells us one generation should tell of the works of the Lord to the next generations. We are designed to invest in each other and sharing our stories is one way to do it. But how will our descendants learn these stories if we don’t continue to gather and retell them? As time and health permit, this website will be “my front porch” for sharing some personal family stories and other short stories.

I challenge you to begin sharing stories within your own family. Perhaps some of mine will remind you of your own, or will spur you to begin asking questions of your own relatives.

Phyllis's Recent Posts
Family Stories

Lesson From NASA

While our sons grew up in the 1970s-80s, we lived a few miles from the Johnson Space Center in the southeast Houston Metroplex. It was where the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) center for human spaceflight was located. Our proximity influenced our sons since we could periodically stop by or attend special NASA programs. Hence, large space flight pictures were plastered on the boys’ walls, and they were exuberant in their youthful rocket-building attempts.  Another benefit of living near...read more
Family Stories

Storm Warning

We moved to Virginia from the Gulf Coast in 1988, thinking we left hurricanes behind—wrong. Yes, we’re miles from the Atlantic. However, last week was another round of rain and wind battering us as the remnants of a hurricane worked northward. It reminded me that 41 years ago this week, Alicia suddenly mushroomed into a hurricane in August of 1983 off the coast of Texas and hit close to our house as a category 3 about 24 hours later. Alicia was the first major hurricane to form in the Gulf of Mexico in six...read more
Other Stories

Tree Analogy #2: Hanging Sod

Whenever I hear a hurricane is predicted or see pictures of its destruction, my thoughts return to August 1983, when Hurricane Alicia made landfall near Galveston, Texas, 30 miles across Galveston Bay from where we lived. Alicia was the first major hurricane to form in the Gulf of Mexico since 1977 and the first named hurricane of the 1983 season. We woke up on August 17 to discover it had just formed off the Texas-Louisiana coast and was drifting NW about 5 mph toward the Texas coast. By 2 AM that night, it had become a...read more
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A head-on car collision. Job loss. The death of a child. Phyllis and Monty Kester survived all these crises and more. But one thing remained constant throughout: the inspirational love story between a husband and wife and their Lord. learn more