Front Porch Review
A literary magazine for the young at heart and mind

            We live a block west of town, easy walking distance to the library, pharmacy, grocer, post office, book store, coffee shop and bank. Younger residents congregate at the ice cream and sandwich shops. More fashionable residents than I enter and leave designer shops. The streets are busy with comings and goings.
            Today, a warm day in May, I walk past the playground where three slim, stylish and freshly graduated eighth-grade girls fold themselves inside a red-and-black, wooden train engine. They cross their bare legs, hold cell phones and share stories in serious tones. The girls' limbs, so newly long, wriggle in a tangle inside the small cab.
            A boy mows the green lawn the way a child rides his bike for the first time. His father follows him with directions the way a father coaches his child to ride without training wheels. “Mow closer to the tree!” he insists.
            An alley, lined with gardens and playing children, leads home from town and the park. One of the young has grown from small and ball-playing into oversized pants and cigarette smoking behind the garage.
            The ordinary traffic of people is likely to be lost to memory the way a camera lens, left open, preserves the image of stationary structures while erasing the people in motion among them. Before the landscape of a village changes significantly, children grow up and parents grow old. Young families will move in to take their places. A walk into town is not just an errand; it is an opportunity to preserve – to paint fleeting moments in words.

By Susan Myrick

Susan Myrick, retired from a career of teaching high school science, photography and cooking, relishes her precious leisure to pursue a passion for words and the need to use them. Writing has expanded her photographer's habit of capturing into stillness that which compels her to record and preserve. She finds that writing frees her from the tyrannies of time, chance and miserable human beings.

Susan's work has appeared in several volumes of Northwestern University's School of Continuing Studies The Journal and Story Circle Journal as well as in two anthologies, Gifts from Our Grandmothers and Kitchen Table Stories. Her papers for the ninety-year-old literary club, The Winnetka Fortnightly, are stored in the Chicago history section of the Newberry Library in Chicago.