It's a Front Porch Life

Here's hoping that "It's a Front Porch Life" will be a semi-regular feature (which means whenever I feel the urge) from now on! This is the first installment:
  The Daughter lives in an urban neighborhood. The kind where there are front porches on most of the houses. They are not those little things that I call a stoop that passes for a front porch in suburbia. I am talking deep porches with deep eaves that were designed to allow breezes to circulate in and around the porches and the houses they frame. The Daughter lives in one such house that was built about 1910. Granted there are some disadvantages to living in a house built in 1910, but most of those can be rectified with some creativity, something called hard labor or sweat equity, along with plenty of that green stuff otherwise known as money, but I digress.
     Today the daughter had a fig-picking party. She invited several of her close friends and their children to help harvest the bounty from the fig tree in the front yard. They made the front porch the base of operations for the fig-picking adventure. The fig tree is a lovely obliging lady who has produced figs from top to bottom, and this year she has made everybody in the neighborhood happy. The birds stop by first thing in the morning to claim their breakfast. They are followed by the squirrels who dart in and out in an attempt to remain anonymous (why squirrels act this way, I have no idea). The little chipmunks who live under the porch have even been known to take a mid-afternoon fig break, and there have been more than a few neighborhood dogs rooting around among the few early figs that have made it to the ground. However, despite the members of the animal kingdom who enjoy the figs, it's the adults and the toddlers who are loving Miss Figgy the best.
   Little One is convinced that God put that tree and those figs there just for her. When The Daughter and her husband moved in two years ago in August, the fig tree was forlorn and neglected. The previous owners had spent most of their time renovating the house and probably considered the overgrown bush in the front yard to be a nuisance. Little did they know.
   Now that once downtrodden fig tree is fat and happy. Last year's harvest was good, but this year's harvest is looking like it's going to be phenomenal. I just know it's all that front porch love, conversation, and water that Little One and her family have been giving Miss Figgy. And Miss Figgy is thanking them in return for bringing her out of obscurity and back into the mainstream of life by producing a marvelous bounty of sweet juicy figs! You go girl!

Source: google.com via Missy on Pinterest

Source: flickr.com via Le Boudoir Gourmand - Mélody - on Pinterest

Tomorrow I will share the Baby Sister's easy recipe for Fig Preserves. She has shared her preserves with me, and I can promise you that they won't last long around your house!