Couple years ago at the Forest Service campground where I was hosting, a homeless family set up camp. Ma, pa, half dozen kids between 6 and 12. They were clearly struggling financially, as they came up with the site fee one day at a time. The kids were respectful and well behaved, but still just kids, you know. It was clear their meals were pulled together from whatever they could scrounge up, and the kids were often hungry and while they never went around begging, every once in a while I see one of those kids standing downwind of somebody’s barbie salivating.
One of the older kids and I got to talking and I learned dad was working but they had lost their home a couple months back, and the kids were promised they’d have a new one before winter. And that dinner the night before had consisted of some potatoes pulled out of a dumpster behind a grocery.
A couple days later my wife came up to camp with a bag full of surplus snow peas from our garden and I took them over to the homeless family. Dad accepted my gift with a thank you, but had never seen snow peas and asked what one did with them. I said the whole pea and pod were edible, and while you could boil them for a couple minutes, I rather liked them raw. I showed him how you snap off the stem and flower ends, and be careful to never eat one with any signs of decay because of botulism, and stuck one in my mouth to eat it.
He had eyed me suspiciously but very tentatively took one and put it in his mouth, no doubt concerned I was offering dumpster leavings instead of food fresher than money can buy. As his taste buds kicked in, his eyes lit up, thanking me he tuned to the kids who had clustered around and began sharing and repeating my instructions to ditch any that weren’t perfect and snap off the very ends. The kids devoured those snow peas in minutes like little sharks on fresh kill.
At the end of their 14 days, they dutifully moved. Nice people but down on their luck just trying to get by.
