The two of us were all the way up on the porch before Joey’s Mom came out of the house while wiping her hands with what I took to be a dishtowel. I later learned it was one of Joey’s older cloth diapers that he’d outgrown. Joey did a sort of end run around his Mom and I nearly fell flat on my face. As it was, I stumbled and had to grab onto the back of Joey’s shirt to keep from falling. That is when I noticed, that Joey was dressed much the same as I was, except he had on shoes and socks and a backwards blue ball cap with a red maple leaf on the front.
“Whoa, whoa!” his mother said, “Slow it down boys!”
“I am going to show him what I made!” Joey said impatiently.
“Well, that can wait for a minute, can’t it?” She said pulling my arm free from Joey’s grasp and giving me the biggest, warmest hug I’ve had in a very long time. It felt so good that I didn’t want her to ever let me go. She loosened her embrace just enough so that she could pull my head back and look me in the eyes.