## The Community Meals Program, Again
I want to come back to the program, because it matters and because it is the context in which all of this happened and also the thing that kept me most grounded through it.
The Hartfield Community Kitchen Initiative delivers meals to approximately two hundred and forty households per month. The meals go to homebound seniors, to families with a member in active treatment for serious illness, to households experiencing a crisis that temporarily makes meal preparation impossible. We have seventeen partner organizations and a volunteer base of about eighty active regulars and a larger pool of occasional contributors.
I started the program three years after Carl died, which is the timeline I would have predicted: I needed two and a half years to grieve in the full sense and then I needed to build something. Building is how I make meaning. I am not a person who processes through stillness, though I have had to learn a version of stillness since the dinner. I process through work.
The program is the thing I would tell Carl about if I could call him. He would ask how many households, which was always his first question about things that involved numbers, and I would tell him two hundred and forty, and he would say that was significant, and then he would ask about the logistics, which he always understood with a practical clarity that I found useful, and we would talk through whatever problem I was working on and he would say something concrete and right.