EVERY SUNDAY AT 4 O'CLOCK I WAVE.
WAVE BACK!

Hello, and welcome to my porch. My name is Helen Burkholder. I am 81 years old and I live in a mobile home park in Lakeland, Florida, where it is warm and nobody has to shovel anything. Most of my family is still up in Dayton, Ohio, where I was born and raised and where I worked 34 years for the telephone company, most of them at a switchboard. So I am used to talking to people I can't see. This is the other way around.

My grandson William set this up when the family came down for Christmas. There is a little camera up on the wall of the lanai and a computer just inside the sliding door, and every ten minutes it sends a picture of my porch to the Internet so they can see me up in Ohio. On Sundays at 4 o'clock I sit in my glider and wave, and my daughter Phyllis has everybody over for Sunday dinner and they all crowd around her computer and wave back. I can't see them, but I know they're doing it, because Phyllis tells me on the telephone at 4:15.

MY WEEK

MY HIBISCUS
That big bush with the red flowers outside the screen is my hibiscus. My husband Maurice grew it from a cutting the year we bought this place, and it is taller than the roof now. Maurice passed away in March of 1995. He would have thought this camera business was the silliest thing he ever heard of, and then he would have sat out here every Sunday and waved with me. Each flower lasts only one day, so if you see one on Tuesday, you won't see that one again.

THE LITTLE LIZARDS
We have little brown lizards all over down here. They climb the outside of the screen and do push-ups at each other, and the males puff out an orange flap under the chin. If you see a tiny dark speck on the screen in a picture, that is probably one of them. My great-grandchildren want me to catch one and mail it. I will not.

PEOPLE WHO WAVED BACK THIS MONTH
Thank you to everybody who sent me an e-mail to say they waved!

• Phyllis and the whole Dayton crowd, every Sunday
• My sister-in-law in Fort Wayne, Indiana
• A gentleman in Ontario, Canada, who found my porch by accident and comes back every week
• A Sunday school class in Indiana. Hello, children!
• A nurse in Arizona who says I look like her grandmother

HURRICANE SEASON
Several of you wrote to ask about Hurricane Floyd in the middle of the month. Thank you for thinking of me. Floyd stayed well out to sea off the east coast of Florida, and all we got here in Lakeland was a breezy day. I brought in the glider cushions and the potted plants and filled the bathtub anyway, because that is what you do. The season runs through November, so I'm keeping my flashlight where I can find it.

See two of my favorite pictures from the camera
(my canasta ladies, and the porch at night)

Write to me! I read every one.
[email protected]