I spent the afternoon at Spillian — giving friends Susan, Bernie, Marlene, and Bill a tour of house and woods, and working with Lanie and her crew to clear out the house. We’ve pulled a bunch of things out for a garage sale to benefit Fleischmanns, but there were a lot of things in the house that we didn’t think would work for this, and we were planning to throw most of it away.

Lanie runs an ad hoc group in Sullivan/Delaware Counties that informally helps people out who are in need, and they took almost everything that we didn’t know what to do with! Really amazing. There are a lot of people who live up here who are really struggling to survive.

The most meaningful story of the day — two little single beds that I’d happily have consigned to the dumpster were going to a couple who wanted to adopt their granddaughters. They’d been told by Child Services that the double bed they’d bought for the girls wasn’t going to work — they needed single, toddler-appropriate beds, or the girls would have to stay in foster care. Well, those two little white beds I thought were stupid don’t seem so stupid any longer…

Louis Fleischmann, one of the brothers who had a house on the hill, was the inventor of the term “bread line” when he gave free bread (and then jobs and family support) to struggling men who would come to smell bread baking in NYC at the Fleischmann family’s Vienna Bakery.(More on that here…) I think he would have been proud of us today…

I am very grateful. Grateful to have a chance to be in this gloriously beautiful place and grateful to be reminded that sometimes a bed is all that it takes to find happiness. Our thanks to Lanie and her crew to reminding us of that today.