April Rain, Cold

April 10, 2019

Drizzled two days. 

Went home from First Christian Church just past midnight, saw a group of homeless lying huddled on the sidewalk beneath an overhang and another at the main entrance, lying beneath a colorful fleece blanket.  Yet another had some black plastic.  Across the street at the library were more people curled up next to a wall to escape the rain.

I started my diagonally parked car; the headlight glared on the homeless person with black plastic.  I should have turned off the lights before I started the car, I thought.  I shivered with the dampness. The bleakness.  Half block farther a large man with rain-glistening coat and a smaller woman in white crossed at the light.  The woman looked odd because she seemed to lean backward as though her legs were walking without her cooperation. Some will not sleep tonight.

I had left Pastor Mulberry alone to watch the nine men and women who slept in the church choir room.  Apparently the coordinator is having trouble recruiting enough volunteers for two chaperones at each three-hour shift.  The project is called, “My Backyard,” for carefully screened homeless to sleep in a church from 9 pm to 6 am during cold weather.

I slept in today until 8:30 when Sasha from the Community Crisis Center asked me if I’d volunteer again tonight.  Sure, I said. Nine to midnight.

I got up. Our famous dog, Gunther, waited at the back door for me to walk him to the end of our rainy block so he could relieve himself.  We hurried home for morning routine:  coffee, read the news, check the blog, emails, Facebook, work on the NY Times puzzles.  Cereal.  This morning I made a fire in the stove.  P. is working on a quilt she says is ugly.  I urged her to finish the damned thing.  Made her laugh.

Today P. volunteers at Broadwater grade school to help with language arts.  Weather permitting, I’ll work on our back fence, to plant a post, nail horizontals, erect cedar boards.  A young man marked the location of the natural gas line yesterday with a can of yellow spray paint and a metal detector. I remembered to phone a couple days ago when I was digging a post hole and I said to myself, I wonder what’s down there?