There are lots of Mrs. Ruth stories. 

Lots.

I remember the first time she walked across the front yard to speak. We’d just closed on the house, May 31, 2016. I suspect she sort of dreaded talking to us; we quickly discovered she’d seen us turning around across the street from her house in the city access drive on the back side of the soccer fields many, many times as we came, driving by our new soon-to-be-ours house in the spring of 2016. 

I really didn’t know what we were getting into with our new neighbor. I remember the nervous dread of seeing her walking my way that first time. I didn’t know that I was about to meet one of the best friends I’d have for the next decade. 

Oh, if I only knew then what I know now.

Mrs. Ruth is the single best thing that happened to me in the last decade. 

Oliver was 2 years old, Porter was 9, and Liam had just turned 8 when we met Mrs. Ruth. 

My Nannie, my own grandmother, had died the year before I met Mrs. Ruth, in 2015. 

Most times when I took the dogs out, there was Mrs. Ruth, to chat.

Mrs. Ruth was there during some of the hardest years of my life. 

Mrs. Ruth did not bat an eye when I shaved my head in 2020 after the botched bleach job. Whatever she really thought, she told me she liked it and went right on talking. 

She didn’t care that I was on SSDI for bipolar disorder and PTSD. I ended up hospitalized during the time we lived next door and she acted like it was just something that happens sometimes. It was a non-issue for her.

That’s pretty unusual for someone of her generation. 

For someone who hated the magnolia trees that were in our yard but whose leaves fell in her yard, she never said a single solitary thing to us about it. 

I could talk to Mrs. Ruth about anything and everything, and did. And I’m pretty sure she felt the same.

Mrs. Ruth died last week. 

It was her Japanese tulips that I’d go photograph every April or so whenever they bloomed. But I have lots of photos of them. We had light pink ones in our yard but she had a gorgeous deep plum-colored Japanese tulip tree. I posted a photo last week from 2024’s blooms. She called me this year to say that they wouldn’t be worth taking a picture this year. 

Moving six minutes away from her street in 2021 meant that we had to pick up the phone instead of walking out into the front yard to see Mrs. Ruth, but we still talked frequently and visited, too. 

There are lots of Mrs. Ruth stories. Some, I will never tell.

But this one… this one is worth telling.

In recent years, Mrs. Ruth had taken to presenting me with banana bread when I visited. Sometimes holidays, sometimes random visits.

So sometime in the past year, I said, “Mrs. Ruth, I want you to make a list of the ingredients for your banana bread and I want to bring them and I want you to teach me how to make your banana bread.” 

So she said, “Here, I’ll show you,” and led me to her pantry, where she promptly presented me with this box of premixed Pillsbury mix, telling me to take it home with me. 

I hadn’t laughed so hard in a long time, and she laughed, too. I laughed about that for weeks— the banana bread tasted homemade, and it really was some of the best ever. She said it was better than her homemade receipe. It does rival my own grandmother’s, my Daddy’s Mama’s, banana bread.

I held onto that box of banana bread mix, not in any hurry to make it here at home.

But tomorrow is my birthday, and I’m missing Mrs. Ruth terribly. I got to talk to her the day before she got sick last week, and I’ll be forever grateful. I’m grateful it was just a normal, like so many times in the past, conversation.

Just a regular check-in. 

So today’s the day for baking her banana bread.

I’ll be forever grateful that, whatever our differences, and there were many, and however unconventional it was for someone her age and someone my age to be good friends— I’m grateful that I got to know Mrs. Ruth.

I didn’t know in 2016 how badly I needed a friend just like her.

Grateful.