What Should We Do?

We’ve known Willy for a long time. My husband is the type of person that will strike up a conversation with just anyone. While I was grocery shopping a few years ago he met this character, I mean he was a real character. I was surprised at how much the picture I found from Dreamstime reminded me of him.  He wasn’t scary though, just kindly and well, benign. We got to know him and visited him occasionally. He was a harmless ole soul somewhere in his seventies, but his living conditions were pathetic. I remember clearly the first time my husband convinced me to step into his ‘trailer’. I had been dreading it, but finally agreed. It was so awful that my stomach heaved. I mean how would you feel if you walked across a yard littered with tin cans and into this, uh…dwelling where the uncovered mattress where he slept was a few feet from the door and it was more gray than, well, than a clean color. It was night when we got there, but as far as I could tell there were only a few feet of standing room right close to the stove. I have no idea what, aside from open and unopened cans of food filled all that space, except for one thing. I saw a chunk of orange cheese, uncovered cheddar cheese, lurking among the debris.

               He isn’t poor by any means, more likely a millionaire but we offered to help him anyway. I wanted to send him casseroles now and then, but no way, he was afraid of being poisoned. Others had done that and he had gotten sick. Come to think of it, he probably did, and it wasn’t just a psychological thing, because I kind of doubt he has any refrigeration.

               We worried about that old guy way out there, and Stephen—oops, I wasn’t going to reveal my husband’s name : ) would drive twenty miles out of his way to check up on him before coming home from work from time to time.

               Please don’t take me wrong but it was a relief when he had a bit of an accident and ended up in the hospital, then later in a lodge. We hardly recognized the fellow without his huge, bushy beard and matted hair. But the poor fella was pining away, and some neighbour eventually brought him back to his ‘farm’. Last spring his trailer tried to burn down but it was too full of junk to be leveled, and since then he’s been living in one of several rusty trucks on the yard.

               Well, to make a long story short, I say tritely, we stopped in this evening after going to the city to do our shopping. It was around nine, I guess, and my husband took his trusty flashlight to find out in which pickup he had bedded down in. He found him all right, and he seemed to have plenty of blankets but there weren’t many footprints in the snow, meaning he hasn't been in and out of his ‘home’ very much since the snow came a week or so ago. Stephen didn’t want to wake him ‘cuz we had no idea how he might react.

               Well, folks, what should we do? What would we do? We talk about the homeless situation from time to time, and I’ve even said we need to help them one person at a time. But HOW?