Time for Collards, Chili Mac, and Trying

I am making collards with smoked turkey wings.

Here is the before picture.

There won’t be an after picture for a good long while. You’ll just have to believe in the promise of my collards.

Big cold is coming tomorrow and will last through Tuesday. Overnight warming rooms for homeless folks will be open a bit longer and other places are opening during the daytime, including one of the county’s largest public facilities. People are pitching in. I’m pitching in.

It’s the right thing to do but it’s also therapeutic. It’s comforting to find the smallest, thinnest patch of common ground, a square of plaid cloth in the sewing basket, intended for a quilt that never got made or saved to patch somebody’s jeans. I don’t sew except metaphorically.

I served dinner last night at a warming room alongside my younger son. Chili mac and green beans. It smelled terrific. When people came into the warming room, I could see their spirits lift knowing that dinner was there. They put their packs and coats down and came over. We didn’t cook the food, we just ladled it and, like I knew it would, the serving up of hot foot to people tired but not too tired to smile or joke around felt like treatment for all that ails us right now right here in this moment in our country.

To be kind to people, you have to put yourself where they can be kind to you.

That’s what I think today on the eve of the big cold snap with my collards coming along alright downstairs.