It wasn’t uncommon to get a bag of fruit, vegetables, or preserves from the neighbors. Especially when I was younger I remembered that everyone seemed to be bottling the fruit off their fruit trees, giving away zucchinis, and giving away zucchini bread from the zucchinis they couldn’t get rid of. You know, you want to share your bounty with the neighbors, because your neighbors were your friends and that’s what you’d do, you’d share with them, and they’d share with you. You didn’t need an apricot tree if the neighbors had one, because they’d end up with more apricots than they could use and vise-versa. So fresh produce from a neighbor wasn’t an unusual gift to see on the kitchen counter. There was one bag of nectarines, however, that was an especially important gift to me.
Sister Hall was a widow in the ward who had had polio when she was younger, and as a result had trouble getting around. She needed a walker to help her get from place to place. My first memories of Sister Hall came when I turned fourteen and became my Dad’s home teaching companion. Really it was through those visits to Sister Hall that my Dad taught me the importance of home teaching; what a home teacher really is. I could see that my Dad loved and cared for Sister Hall and took his responsibility to care for this widow very seriously. I’ll never forget my Dad always going to shovel Sister Hall’s steps and driveway after a snowstorm. He remembered the little things that she’d need, and he made sure the priesthood was always available to her and her family in her home.
Years later when I was living away from home going to college we found out that my Dad had cancer and that it was unlikely he live much longer. Maybe a year at the most. As the cancer progressed there were fewer foods my Dad could include in his diet. A few days before he passed away I remember waking up and eating breakfast with him. We had fruit on cereal. He liked to eat fruit because it was one of the few things he could eat that would help get rid of the awful taste he always had in his mouth.
My dad died on July 15, 2007. That day we put a note on our front door thanking people that would come by for their thoughts and prayers, but asking them not to disturb us so we could have some time just as a family. Later that evening we opened the front door and found a few things that people had left on the porch, including a bag of fresh nectarines from Sister Hall. Sister Hall knew how much my dad enjoyed nectarines, and that simple gift was just what my Dad would have appreciated most. The nectarines came too late for my Dad to enjoy them, but that gift had a profound effect on me. The bag of nectarines from Sister Hall seemed to me like the widow’s mite in the New Testament. There was so much love in that gift from a widow to her home teacher in need. And isn’t that what it’s really all about. All of us loving and caring about each other. That’s Zion to me.
