Thinking of the Less Fortunate

Being the holidays and a little chilly here in Louisiana, I thought of a lady and daughter who flittered through my life once. I was wondering how they were.

See, when we lived in Pittsburgh, we lived in the city, right on the border of one of the nicest and one of the nastiest neighborhoods. You know how city living can be. Well, across the street from our house was a condominium building. Their owners rented some of the condominiums out as apartments, so a few had some questionable tenants. One being a heroine dealer whose stint there involved his two-year-old falling out of the third story window and breaking only his arm, and my car being stolen twice by the same druggie!

Anyway, that’s another story. This story is about the tenant who took residence in that same apartment when the drug dealer got busted and no longer lived there.

I had seen this lady come and go many times with her daughter for a few months. We exchanged cordial hellos and small talk as we passed on the street. I assumed she was just another resident in that building. Then, one day all that changed.

We had purchased a house and were preparing to move. In our preparations, we were going through our stuff and putting stuff out on the sidewalk for the garbage. I had old clothing, old mops, brooms, old magazines, and cleaning supplies bottles that were practically empty. I left to take a load of stuff to the new house and returned to find the new neighbor and her daughter rummaging through my pile of stuff on the sidewalk. They had the nasty old broom and mop, many of my magazines and the dish soap bottle with a half inch of solution left in it. I also noticed her daughter was wearing my old track jacket. I was slightly taken aback that my neighbor was going through my garbage but shrugged and went inside. A little while later, I carried an old double bed mattress and box spring out to the curb as well. It was really old and broken down. We had just bought a new one. About an hour later, another neighbor knocked on my door. He asked if we were throwing out the mattress set or if we just had it out there to move it. I told him it was for the garbage. He then told me about the lady across the street.

She had moved there from South Carolina and was part of a domestic violence rescue program.