Skip to the good part

Set the page to your liking — it remembers you.

Dot Merriweather
Sunny Days Large Print Stories, Book One

Pull up a chair.

Twenty-five gentle mysteries from Butternut Lane, in print you can actually read.

Get Dot’s letters
  • Every mystery is solved by the last page.
  • Each story finishes in one sitting.
  • A question to share at the end of every story.

Harold’s light blinks twice at nine, rain or clear. Yours can too.

Book cover on a warm marigold ground: a cream line drawing of a rocking chair with a plaid throw, a steaming mug and a glowing porch lantern. The title reads Dot’s Front Porch Mysteries, 25 Gentle Large Print Mystery Stories, by Dot Merriweather, with a Large Print badge in the corner.

Read the first page

Story Two: Two Blinks

Harold’s porch light blinks twice at nine o’clock, every night, rain or clear. A loose bulb does not own a watch.

A porch light on a wall bracket, glowing
The pencil drawing that opens the story, as it appears in the book.

The first time I noticed Harold’s porch light blink, I was looking for my reading glasses and found a mystery instead. It was nine o’clock on a Tuesday evening, and I was out on my own porch with a cup of decaf, which is what a person drinks when she wants the comfort of coffee without the argument it starts at bedtime. Across the street, Harold’s light went dark, came back, went dark, and came back again. Two blinks, quick as a wink from an old friend. Then it burned steady the rest of the night.

I told myself it was a loose bulb. That lasted until Wednesday, when it happened again at nine o’clock straight up. A loose bulb does not own a watch. Thursday I made sure I was on the porch with my glasses on. Nine o’clock. Blink, blink. Steady. Friday I sat out there in a light rain under the awning, feeling like a woman on a stakeout in one of Mrs. Alvarez’s paperbacks, and at nine o’clock exactly the light went dark, came back, went dark, and came back. I put down my cup and said, out loud, to nobody, “Well, now.”

I want to be fair to Harold, because he is the kind of neighbor every street deserves. If your gate squeaks on Monday, it is silent by Thursday, and if you thank him for it, he will look at you like you had accused him of a crime. He fixed my mailbox flag two winters ago and told me the wind must have done it. The wind, as far as I know, does not carry a screwdriver. When the Hendersons’ boy put a baseball through the church basement window, it was Harold who drove him to the glass place, paid the difference the paper route couldn’t cover, and instructed the boy, at length, on the correct way to say nothing about it. So whatever the light was, I knew two things. It was deliberate, and it was none of my business.

or get Dot’s letters instead

What’s inside

A gentler kind of mystery.

Every mystery is solved by the last page.

Some are puzzles with every clue on the page, and some are small wonders. None of them leave you hanging, and none of them end anywhere but kindly.

Each story finishes in one sitting.

Ten to fifteen minutes with a cup of something warm. Read one with your morning coffee and save the next for tomorrow.

A question to share at the end of every story.

Each story closes with a Front Porch Question to talk over. There are no wrong answers and no test.

The stories

Twenty-five evenings on Butternut Lane.

Open any one for a peek at its drawing, its first lines and the question it leaves you with.

Showing all 25 stories.

A glass raffle jar with coins and folded bills beside a roll of tickets

The church bazaar comes to Cedar Falls every June the way the robins come in March, which is to say on schedule and with a great deal of noise.

Front Porch Question

Who ran things on your street — and who finally got to tell her thank you?

A porch light on a wall bracket, glowing

The first time I noticed Harold’s porch light blink, I was looking for my reading glasses and found a mystery instead.

Front Porch Question

Who said goodnight to you without ever saying a word?

A foil-covered casserole dish with a small label

Every street has laws nobody wrote down, and on Butternut Lane the oldest ones govern casseroles.

Front Porch Question

Whose cooking always came out sized for more people than were at the table — and who got fed because of it?

A cat looking down at an old-fashioned key

Whiskers is not my cat. I want that in the record, because he has been eating on my porch since the first of June and a person’s reputation is at stake.

Front Porch Question

What did you ever wish for on a little slip of paper — and did somebody, someday, quietly make it come true?

An open stamp saver book filled with stamps

The library book sale happens on the last Saturday of June, in the church basement because the library doesn’t have one, and it runs on donations, card tables, and the…

Front Porch Question

What did you save up for, stamp by stamp — and what did you give away before you ever got it?

A rotary telephone with a curly cord

The telephone company gave me a new number in June, and the telephone company gave me a mystery with it, though they did not charge me extra for that part.

Front Porch Question

What number could your hand still dial in the dark, and who answered it?

A large prize tomato on a plate with a ribbon card

The drought came in the first week of July and settled in like a relative who doesn’t say when he’s leaving.

Front Porch Question

What good thing happened on your street that nobody ever took credit for?

A bundle of old letters tied with string

The Cutler place next door to Miss Vivian has been getting a renovation all summer, which on Butternut Lane counts as entertainment.

Front Porch Question

What arrived in your life long after it was mailed, and was it still right on time?

A child's bicycle with a banana seat, a bell and one streamer

The call came into the station on a Tuesday in August, and I learned of it within the hour, because the boy it happened to is Pearl’s sister’s grandson, and news on this…

Front Porch Question

Whose rules from your school days do you still keep, without ever deciding to?

An old tabletop radio with a round dial

Pearl keeps a radio in the back room of the bakery, on the shelf above the proofing cabinet, an old cream-colored table set with a gold dial and a hum you feel in your teeth…

Front Porch Question

What song takes you straight back to somebody’s kitchen, and whose kitchen was it?

A wide-brimmed Sunday hat with a ribbon band and a tucked note

I have owned exactly one good straw hat in my life, and for about four hours on a Sunday in September, half of Cedar Falls believed it was carrying on a secret romance.

Front Porch Question

What did your town once get gloriously wrong about somebody, and who set it right?

An open library book with a pressed flower and a date-due slip

The after-hours slot at the Cedar Falls Public Library has swallowed a great many things over the years.

Front Porch Question

What did you once keep far too long, because giving it back meant the ending was real?

A picket fence with a paintbrush leaning against it

The fence between Harold’s side yard and the old Pruett place got painted in the night, and I mean painted properly — primed where it was bare, brushed with the grain, no…

Front Porch Question

Who on your street won an argument by giving in — and never once said so?

Torn pieces of a handwritten list beside a pencil

If you want to find out what a town owes its librarian, lose her list. I don’t recommend it — we nearly buried the woman in ladders — but it is educational.

Front Porch Question

What did you borrow once and keep so long it started to feel like yours — and who never said a word about it?

A book with a drive-in ticket tucked between the pages

Every fall the church rummage sale takes over the fellowship hall, and every fall Marge runs it like the invasion of Normandy, and every fall something surfaces out of…

Front Porch Question

What show, dance, or Saturday got rained out on you — and would you still go, if it came back around?

An oil can and a screwdriver

I kept books for the Cedar Falls school district for thirty-one years, and a habit like that does not retire when you do.

Front Porch Question

What still works at your house because somebody loved somebody, and never said so?

A tin recipe box with a rooster painted on the side

The recipe box at Pearl’s bakery sits on the shelf behind the register, between the flour scoop and the photograph of Pearl’s mother in her Sunday apron.

Front Porch Question

What did your mother make that never once matched the recipe she gave out?

A pair of cable-knit mittens on a bench, with a tag

The first hard cold came the second week of December, the kind that makes the porch boards crack at night like knuckles, and the morning after it came, there was a mitten on…

Front Porch Question

What’s the warmest thing you ever wore that somebody made with their own two hands?

An anniversary clock under a glass dome

The Cedar Falls Historical Society occupies the front rooms of the old Odd Fellows building, and it is kept alive by a furnace with asthma and a rotation of volunteers with…

Front Porch Question

What date on the calendar belongs to just you — and who else knew it once?

A folded newspaper open to a half-done crossword, with a pencil

The Cedar Falls Sentinel arrives at my house by six most mornings, flung from the window of a station wagon by a high-school boy named Petey who has the arm for it and, if…

Front Porch Question

Whose handwriting would you know anywhere, even in one small corner?

A garden gnome holding a postcard of the Eiffel Tower

The first photograph arrived in my mailbox on a Tuesday in late winter, tucked between the electric bill and a coupon flyer, showing my garden gnome standing in front of the…

Front Porch Question

What trip did you and yours keep meaning to take — and what did you make instead, right where you were?

A table lamp with a mended shade and a price tag

The spring charity auction is held in the church hall on the first Saturday after Easter, and it is run by Marge the way Eisenhower ran Europe, which is to say thoroughly,…

Front Porch Question

Whose table did you do your homework at, and did you ever get the chance to thank them for the light?

A cat sitting in the pan of a kitchen scale

The scandal broke, as most of our scandals do, at the bakery, on a morning in April when the forsythia was showing off and nobody was prepared for hard news.

Front Porch Question

Who kept a supper hour at your house — and who came trotting, regular as a bus, because they knew it?

Two snow shovels standing in the snow

All winter long, the walks on Butternut Lane were shoveled by dawn, and nobody did it.

Front Porch Question

What got done around your place, winter after winter, that nobody ever took the credit for?

Three porch lights glowing in a row

The first warm Saturday in May, Butternut Lane held a porch-light supper, which is a thing we invented that evening and will now hold until the end of recorded time, because…

Front Porch Question

Whose porch light would you blink for — and who, all along, was blinking for you?

The question jar

Draw a Front Porch Question.

Twenty-five questions, one closing every story. Draw one and take it to your own porch, your own table, your own people. There are no wrong answers and no test.

Front Porch Question

The jar is waiting. So is the coffee.

The drawings

A pencil illustration opens every story.

Scroll the shelf, or use the arrows. Each drawing is the first thing a reader sees in the book.

Meet the neighbors

The same dozen, story after story.

Next door

Harold

Fixes everything on the Lane and admits to nothing, including the mailbox flag. Says goodnight at nine o’clock in a language of his own.

Two winters ago he fixed my mailbox flag and told me the wind must have done it. The wind, as far as I know, does not carry a screwdriver.

The bakery

Pearl

Saves Dot a cinnamon roll, fishes for news in her gentle way, and will not share her pie recipe with a soul.

She saves me a cinnamon roll, and she fishes for news in her gentle way — “You and Harold looked deep in conference Tuesday.”

The law, such as it is

Officer Danny

Young, careful, and fond of saying he can’t arrest somebody for aggravated kindness. He is not wrong.

“Miss Dot, I can’t arrest somebody for aggravated kindness,” he told me once, and then laughed at his own joke long enough that I had to agree it was funny.

The library

Mrs. Alvarez

Keeps the list of what the town owes her. Once, somebody lost it, and the whole Lane learned what it had been carrying.

If you want to find out what a town owes its librarian, lose her list. I don’t recommend it — we nearly buried the woman in ladders.

The church bazaar

Marge

Runs the rummage sale like the invasion of Normandy, with the big ring of keys on her belt to prove it.

The big ring of keys, on bazaar day, hangs from her belt like a jailer’s, and it had jingled past my table all morning.

Everybody’s cat

Whiskers

Belongs to the whole street and to nobody. Keeps bringing home the things that turn out to matter.

Whiskers is not my cat. I want that in the record, because he has been eating on my porch since the first of June and a person’s reputation is at stake.

Buying for someone you love?

A gift that’s easy on the eyes.

  • Large print paperback, Book One of the Sunny Days Large Print Stories.
  • Twenty-five stories, each one finished before the next begins.
  • Set in 16-point type on cream paper; on Kindle the words go as large as you like.
  • A pencil illustration opens every story, and a Front Porch Question closes it.

The price, the ISBN and the retailer page are not final yet, so there is no buy button here. The day they are, it appears on this page and in The Porch Light — and not a moment before. Leave an email below and Dot will tell you herself.

The Porch Light

One letter a month from Dot’s porch: a story, a question, and whatever the Lane is talking about. One click to leave.

Get Dot’s letters

For reading circles

Six months of afternoons from one book.

Read one story at each gathering, take turns with the reading, and close with the Front Porch Question while the coffee is still warm. Twenty-five stories make about six months of weekly visits.

See the page for activity directors

Front Porch Question

Whose porch light would you blink for — and who, all along, was blinking for you?

The question that closes Story Twenty-Five, and the one readers write in about most.

The Sunny Days Large Print Stories

Every book stands on its own, so you can start anywhere.

Cover of Dot’s Front Porch Mysteries: a cream rocking chair and glowing lantern on a marigold ground.
Book One: Dot’s Front Porch MysteriesTwenty-five gentle mysteries, each solved by the last page. This book.
Concept cover for Christmas on Butternut Lane on a deep berry ground.
Book Two: Christmas on Butternut LaneThe Lane’s old tin star goes missing on tree-lighting night, and unsigned cards keep turning up on porches. Twenty-five stories, one for every day of December.Coming November 2026
Concept cover for The Butternut Lane Word Search Mysteries on a porch-green ground.
Book Three: The Butternut Lane Word Search MysteriesRead a short mystery, find the clues hidden in the word search, then see if you solved it before Dot.

Meet Dot

The nosiest woman in Cedar Falls.

Illustrated portrait of Dot Merriweather: a woman of about seventy-five with silver-white wavy hair, blush-pink reading glasses on an amber bead chain, and a marigold cardigan with a small gold lantern brooch, on a white front porch.

Dot Merriweather

Dot Merriweather was the school secretary three blocks from her house for thirty-seven years, which means she has found more lost mittens, signed more late slips and remembered more children’s names than anyone in Cedar Falls. She has lived on Butternut Lane for forty-one years. Her neighbor Harold fixes everything and admits nothing; Pearl at the bakery will not share her pie recipe; and Whiskers, a cat who belongs to the whole street, keeps bringing home things that turn out to matter. Dot writes the stories down in large print, because a story worth reading should never make you squint. She is usually on her porch by nine.

I’ll leave the light on. — Dot

Story Two: Two Blinks

Settle in. It finishes in one sitting.

A porch light on a wall bracket, glowing

The first time I noticed Harold’s porch light blink, I was looking for my reading glasses and found a mystery instead. It was nine o’clock on a Tuesday evening, and I was out on my own porch with a cup of decaf, which is what a person drinks when she wants the comfort of coffee without the argument it starts at bedtime. Across the street, Harold’s light went dark, came back, went dark, and came back again. Two blinks, quick as a wink from an old friend. Then it burned steady the rest of the night.

I told myself it was a loose bulb. That lasted until Wednesday, when it happened again at nine o’clock straight up. A loose bulb does not own a watch. Thursday I made sure I was on the porch with my glasses on. Nine o’clock. Blink, blink. Steady. Friday I sat out there in a light rain under the awning, feeling like a woman on a stakeout in one of Mrs. Alvarez’s paperbacks, and at nine o’clock exactly the light went dark, came back, went dark, and came back. I put down my cup and said, out loud, to nobody, “Well, now.”

I want to be fair to Harold, because he is the kind of neighbor every street deserves. If your gate squeaks on Monday, it is silent by Thursday, and if you thank him for it, he will look at you like you had accused him of a crime. He fixed my mailbox flag two winters ago and told me the wind must have done it. The wind, as far as I know, does not carry a screwdriver. When the Hendersons’ boy put a baseball through the church basement window, it was Harold who drove him to the glass place, paid the difference the paper route couldn’t cover, and instructed the boy, at length, on the correct way to say nothing about it. So whatever the light was, I knew two things. It was deliberate, and it was none of my business.

Curiosity is my one vice. I gave up sugar in my coffee in 1987 and I never miss it, but I have never once managed to give up wondering.

I ran through the sensible answers first, because a person should. A timer switch, warming up. Except timers don’t warm up, they click, and Harold would sooner rewire the whole county than tolerate a switch that misbehaved. A signal to somebody — but to whom? Harold’s boy lives in Dayton and calls on Sundays. I checked, discreetly, whether anyone else on Butternut Lane had a light doing tricks, which meant three evenings of walking the block at nine with a casserole dish I pretended to be returning. Pearl’s porch: steady. The Kowalski place: dark by eight-thirty. Miss Vivian’s corner window had its lamp lit, but her lamp is lit whenever she is, which is always. Nobody was blinking back. A signal with no receiver. That was the part that stayed with me. A man does not keep sending a message unless the message is the point.

I could have asked him straight out, over the fence, in daylight. But some questions are like June tomatoes. You pick them too early and you ruin them.

Then came the evening in the middle of June when the answer walked up and sat down beside me, or rather, I walked up and sat down beside it. Harold’s knee had been bothering him — not that he said so; a person deduces it from the way a man suddenly has opinions about stairs — and I had a plate of Pearl’s shortbread that was more than one widow needed. So at a quarter to nine I crossed the street, and he said what he always says, “Dot,” which from Harold is a full greeting with cream and sugar in it, and I sat down on his steps and we ate shortbread and discussed the Hendersons’ new fence, which Harold does not approve of, on grounds he declined to specify.

At nine o’clock he stood up, not suddenly, the way a man stands when the news is over. He reached inside the screen door, and the porch light over our heads went dark, came back, went dark, came back. He sat down again beside me on the step with his hand still smelling of shortbread, and he looked across the street. Not at my house. At the second-story window over my porch roof, the one that has been my sewing room since I moved in, and I understood one beat before he spoke, the way you catch a dropped plate before you know your hand has moved.

“Ada’s folks lived in your place,” Harold said. “Before the Muellers, before you. Her room was that one.”

I did not say anything. There is a kind of quiet that does the asking for you.

“We were young,” he said. “Her father liked me fine at four in the afternoon. Not at nine at night.” He turned the shortbread over in his hand like it were a part he was deciding whether to reuse. “House rule was lights out at nine. So her lamp would go off, and I’d flip our porch light twice. Goodnight. She’d flick her flashlight twice back, under the blanket, at the window. Her sister ratted her out exactly once and got a licking’s worth of glares for it. We did that every night for two years, until the wedding. After that I could just say it.”

Forty years he had that woman, and five years now the house behind him has been quiet, and at nine o’clock, every night, rain or clear, Harold still says goodnight.

“The fixture’s original,” he said, because Harold cannot stand on soft ground too long. “Rewired it in ’09. Bulb’s one of the new kind. Lasts.”

“It would have to,” I said.

We sat for a while. The June bugs were knocking themselves silly against the light, which burned steady now, having said what it had to say for the evening. Down the block someone’s sprinkler ticked around and around. Harold ate the last piece of shortbread, and then he said, “You’ll want to know why two blinks and not three,” and I said I supposed I did, and he said, “Three means the flashlight batteries are dying and bring new ones Friday,” and I laughed until I had to hold the porch rail, and Harold looked satisfied, the way he does when a hinge stops squeaking. He never smiled. That is how you know he meant it to be funny.

“She kept the flashlight,” he said. “It’s in the toolbox. Still works.” Of course it still works. It lives at Harold’s house.

I did not stay long past that. There is a politeness in leaving a man alone with his nine o’clock. At the bottom of the steps I turned around and said, “Harold, the whole street watches your light. I’m just the only one nosy enough to ask.”

“The street can watch,” he said. “Watching’s free.” And he picked up the plate, because Harold returns a plate washed or not at all, and went inside, and the light burned over his empty steps like a porch expecting somebody.

Now, I have carried a lot of the Lane’s information in my time, and I will tell you plainly how I handled this piece of it. I never told a soul. Pearl fished, in her gentle way, the next week — “You and Harold looked deep in conference Tuesday” — and I said we had been discussing the Hendersons’ fence, which was true, and Pearl said the whole town was discussing the Hendersons’ fence, which was also true, and that was the end of it. Some things are not secrets. A secret is something you are keeping from people. This was something that was simply not mine to hand around. There is a difference, and a school secretary learns it by Christmas of her first year or finds other work.

But I will confess what I did instead, since it is only you and me and the porch rail.

My own light, all these years, I switched off when I went up to bed, eight-thirty or so, earlier in winter. Now I leave it on. At nine o’clock I am generally out there with my decaf, watching his light say what it says and letting mine burn a minute past — until 9:01 by the kitchen clock, which keeps honest time. Then I turn mine off, and the going-off is the answer. Nothing showy. Two blinks belong to Harold and Ada, and they always will. I would no more borrow them than wear another woman’s wedding ring. Mine just says: heard. Goodnight, both of you. This street is looked after.

Whether he has noticed, I couldn’t tell you. He is Harold. Noticing things and admitting to noticing them are two different trades, and he only ever took up the one. But in July my screen door, which had been sticking since the humidity came in, quietly stopped sticking, and the wind, as far as I know, does not carry a can of 3-in-One oil.

So if you ever drive down Butternut Lane of an evening, and you see a porch light blink twice at nine o’clock sharp, and across the street another one goes out a minute later, now you know what you are looking at. It is not a loose bulb, and it is not a mystery anymore, though it took the nosiest woman in Cedar Falls to solve it. It is a man saying goodnight, the same way he has said it since he was too young and too broke to say it any closer. And it is a neighbor saying back, in the only language the street speaks after dark: sleep well. The light’s on. Somebody knows.

Front Porch Question

Who said goodnight to you without ever saying a word?

From Dot’s Front Porch Mysteries, Book One of the Sunny Days Large Print Stories. The other twenty-four stories are waiting in the book.