LIFE MATTERS

For the love of bread

with LINDA PETERSEN
Posted 6/3/20

During this pandemic, my daughter, Marie, has been helping me with food donations. Four times a week we go to local Stop and Shops to get bread from their bakeries and beverages from Cumberland Farms. We deliver it to the Providence Rescue Mission,

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LIFE MATTERS

For the love of bread

Posted

During this pandemic, my daughter, Marie, has been helping me with food donations. Four times a week we go to local Stop and Shops to get bread from their bakeries and beverages from Cumberland Farms. We deliver it to the Providence Rescue Mission, which serves dinner to 130 people every day and provides weekly boxes of food for 400 families who are homeless or food insufficient. It is an awesome agency that provides a vital service to an increasing number of people who are having difficulty obtaining food, and I am more than happy to be of service.

Last Monday was a bright and cheery day, a perfect day for our “bread run”. Marie and I were both in great moods as we donned masks and went into the first store where we were welcomed with a full cart of bread and bakery items. What a great donation! We transferred the rolls, cupcakes, hamburger buns and bread into the large tote bags I had purchased at the Christmas Tree Shop for only $1. (Sometimes I put the donations in boxes to carry, but, because of my happy mood, I had stopped to buy these bags. Most of the people at the Providence Rescue Mission are homeless and carry their belongings in the little plastic Walmart or Walgreens bags. After we have delivered the donated food, they are welcome to use the bigger, sturdier bags I had purchased.)

The second stop was at Cumberland Farms where we were thrilled to get eight boxes full of milk and orange juice, which completely filled the back seat of my car. What a great donation!

With the trunk full of bread and the seat full of healthy beverages, we still had one stop to go. At the next Stop and Shop we picked up another bread donation, EIGHT boxes worth! What a great donation! Marie looked wide-eyed at the two full carriages and shook her head no, we were not going to be able to fit it all in the car. Ever the person not to turn down any donations, I assured her we would, and we DID. We could only actually fit two of the boxes, so we took the bread out of the other boxes and stuffed it gently in every nook and cranny of the car. When the trunk was as full as it could get, and the back seat was piled high to the ceiling with bread, I made Marie sit in her seat and piled the bread everywhere around her; around her feet, on both sides of her, on her lap, up to the dashboard. She was so covered in loaves of bread that only her face was showing. She looked like one of those pictures that has a huge pile of stuffed animals and the face of a real animal can be seen if one looks real hard. The one thing that set her apart from the bread was the fact that her hair is currently died a deep purple, a clear give away that there was a person amongst the loaves.

I drove slowly to Providence in the low speed lane of Route 95 lest the bread start exploding everywhere. When we finally arrived and parked at the Providence Rescue Mission, I breathed a sigh of relief and we both broke out into laughter. In order to get the bread surrounding Marie, she had to roll down her window inch by inch as I pulled each loaf out and put it in a box, reminding me of clowns spilling out of a tiny car. The mission staff stared in amazement, also laughing, as they emptied the back seat of my car and my trunk loaf by loaf by loaf. The program participants, mostly Spanish speaking, gathered around the car to stare. They joined in the cacophony of hilarity, and I was struck by the thought that laughter sounds the same in any language.

How fortunate we were to get such a large donation of bread and milk and orange juice! Many people bring food donations to the facility, but, on that day, we also brought laughter, a very rare commodity during these times.

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