A speaking invitation, a gardening ‘tip’ and a porch with a story
April 2026
by Margo Oxendine, Contributing Columnist
It has been said that April is the cruelest month. But I have no idea why. So it snows on the newly blooming tulips. So what?
I am happy there is some color other than icy white finally coming back to my yard. April is a month that lifts my spirits.
I can’t forget my favorite April ever. Out of the blue, I got a call from a Cooperative Living reader inviting me to speak to a gathering of garden club ladies from across Virginia. This was one of the kick-off events of the Shenandoah Apple Blossom Festival. There were hundreds of garden-savvy ladies at the luncheon. And then there was me, someone with no talent for gardening whatsoever.
My go-to gardening “tip” back when I was buying and planting flowers was to spend all day bent over the pots and digging the holes, plop the flowers in and then head back to the deck. On my way inside, I’d turn around, looking proudly at the pots, and call out, “You’re on your own!”
Once summer kicks in and temperatures rise, I am no longer interested in going outside for any reason. The closest I get is my screened front porch. I read, eat and, yes, doze off out there from April to November. I love my porch!
I live in the house my mother bought after my father died. She paid for the house, but it did not have a porch. “Oh,” she’d said. “I wish I had enough money to put on a screened front porch. That’s the only thing this house lacks.”
Funny thing, but just a few weeks later, we got a call from a person in Connecticut we did not know. A lot of relatives still lived up there. And Daddy was born and grew up there.
The man who called had bought my grandparents’ house. He said, “I keep getting mail from an insurance company for David McCollum Jr. Would you happen to know who that is?”
“Why, David was my late husband,” Mom replied. So, the caller got our address and forwarded the mail he’d been saving. Here’s where the story gets quirky and interesting: The insurance company had a policy my grandmother had taken out on Daddy, way back when he left to join the Navy during WWII instead of heading to the University of Connecticut. Family lore says Gramma paid a dime a week for this life insurance policy.
Time marched on and the war ended. Daddy came back home, and apparently everyone forgot about that insurance policy. Until the day a stranger living in my grandparents’ house decided to try to track down someone named McCollum.
By a weird and wonderful twist of fate, there was the money my mother needed to build the porch I enjoy to this day. She had plenty left over to buy a bunch of azalea bushes to plant around the outside perimeter. Every year in April, they start blooming. The pink, orange and white bushes bloom in stages, one after the other. How wonderful!
Not a “porch day” goes by that I don’t think of the serendipitous gift from beyond that made our April one to remember through the ages.
I hope your April is far from cruel. Maybe something special will happen!
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