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
Other Stories

Capillary Action

During my childhood in Oklahoma, someone gave me a delightful example of capillary action in plants to answer my questions about thirsty plants. We placed cut daffodils in water with red food coloring added and observed how the colored water moved up the stems into the yellow blooms of the daffodils. The red coloring showed where the water had advanced throughout the plant. After that discovery, I often mixed some red-streaked flowers with regular daffodils in a bouquet to add variety.  Shortly before this...read more
Family Journeys

A Forge and Anvil

Several years ago, I was perplexed when I heard about a plan to construct an accurate replica of a 13th-century French castle in Lead Hill, Arkansas, while adhering to the techniques and tools of 13th-century European castle builders. That’s in the Bull Shoals Lake area of northern Arkansas, near the center of the northern border and southeast of Branson, Missouri. Why would anyone attempt to build a medieval castle in the middle of nowhere?  I discovered that two French citizens living in Arkansas learned...read more
Other Stories

Tree Analogy #5-Bloom

I have a magnet from Hawaii that shows flowers growing out of black volcanic rock. It occupies the corner of my refrigerator door because it reminds me of trees (and other plants) growing out of hardened lava or other seemingly impossible environments. Over the years, I’ve taken many pictures of trees struggling to live in bad settings because I’ve found them inspiring. The tree has no choice about its circumstances, yet it attempts to grow wherever it ends up. I’ve often looked at my little magnet and...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